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Feature: Technology, Media and Grief
Technology is a growing source of concern in the world because it changes in itself, and because its development generates other kinds of changes, many of them unforeseen.
The cover of the death of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife and sister-in-laws offers a vivid, contemporary look at how technology is affecting - sometimes overwhelming -- modern media.
Powerful and manipulative images - John Kennedy Jr. saluting his dead father's casket, nostalgic accounts of the Lost Camelot, images of weeping relatives, neighbors, friends and strangers, debris floating in water - are being transmitted technologically all over the United States and the world, repeated over and over again for hours, days, even when there is no new information to pass along.
As happened after the death of Diana Spencer, this grief becomes ritualized and globalized. It develops momentum of its own. People thousands of miles away - strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
For Americans these images are overwhelming, inescapable. They distort reality, crowd out other news and information and become so potent that become the locus of the country's civic business, the object of attention from public officials all the way up to the President.
When stories involve tragedies that happen to glamorous people - especially nice and attractive ones - technology transforms them into mythic, almost religious figures - Princess Di, and now, John Kennedy, Jr. They quickly becomes subjects not of journalism but adoration, their homes shrines, shrouded in flowers and testimonials. For different sorts of celebrities, however powerful - the controversial Mother Teresa comes to mind -- attention paid their passing is fleeting.
In recent decades, major stories like this have increasingly become driven by new technologies, especially the new genre of stories one could call Techno-Tragedies: the crash of TWA Flight 800, the OJ Simpson trial, the death of Princess Di, the war in Kosovo.
Thanks to satellite and digital advances, distant stories are no longer related to us by remote correspondents describing things we can't see for ourselves in places we can't go. Increasingly, journalists are referees presenting conflicting points-of-view, or simply narrators of images we are all seeing simultaneously, most frequently on TV, increasingly on the Net.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
Thus they frequently involve either celebrities or war. You will never see round-the-clock coverage on cable of famine in Africa or the declining quality of America's public schools. This kind of fusion coverage is reserved almost exclusively for potent techno-memes - people whose images warrant being fired all over the world at astonishing speed with numbing frequency.
War and tragedies involving the famous are perfect fuel for technologically - driven media. They offer riveting, addictive images. These images can distort reality. War is presented as bloodless and precise.
Nuance is nearly impossible. Diana Spencer, a humanistic celebrity, becomes a Saint. John Kennedy Jr. an affable magazine publisher, becomes the symbol of his generation, his tragedy a generational benchmark. Stories like Kennedy's plane crash are covered beyond all proportion or their natural place in news and history.
The power of technology seems to cause us to lose our moral bearings. There is no middle ground or civilized discourse, hardly any place to go to consider the impact of technology or the images it's bringing us in thoughtful, reasoned ways.
The tragic is confused with the historic. To be famous is to be heroic, to be earnest is to be noble.
"The news that John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Lauren Besette are missing at sea and presumed dead has struck such a crippling blow for my generation," wrote Douglas Brinkley, a contributing editor of Kennedy's George Magazine and a history professor at the University of New Orleans, in the New York Times Monday. "?it's hard to escape the pang of disbelief, the empty feeling that a magical friend has gone away."
On CNN, a friend of the Kennedy family said on Tuesday that Kennedy "was the icon, the moral leader for the next generation of young Americans." This theme was repeated throughout the weekend, on TV, in newspapers, and on discussion groups on the Web. On MSNBC, Kennedy was described as "the flower of his generation, the inspiration for young America."
As the family friends and admirers spoke, images of young Kennedy playing in the White House, saluting his dead father, being surrounded with paparazzi, walking bare-chested at Brown University, were broadcast on the screen over and over again, all over the world. So were eerie pictures of helicopters and boats searching and searching, relatives grieving and ravaged.
Many of these images were visceral, highly charged, all playing to sadness and sympathy, all choreographed visually to underscore pathos and import, to unnerve and disconcert.
In a media fusion event like this one, they are repeated countless thousands of times over days. The same impulses exist on the Net, and Web, of course, they the imagery is missing, thus the impact muted. Even the so-called "serious" media got into the mythology business, speculating about family curses and the always mythical "Camelot."
"It's like John Kennedy being assassinated all over again," wrote a Chicago woman in an AOL chat room devoted to the plane crash all weekend. "A black shroud has come over all of us."
This quasi-hysterical media rhetoric underlies the humility and unpretentiousness of John Kennedy Jr.?s own life.
He deliberately decided to forego a life of moral leadership and public service. He was, from most accounts, a decent, likeable Manhattan media fixture, a publisher of a slick, glossy, not-in-any-sense great magazine that focused in equal parts on politics and Hollywood.
What his death underscores is that technology -- always an engine of social change -- is radically reshaping, even replacing journalism, becoming an engine of change in and of itself. In stories like this, technology eradicates the core function of journalism - clear-headed truth telling and grounded perspective.
Few places in the developing world are free from this kind of bombardment. A wire service reported that Scandinavian, German, and British newspapers were running as many pages on the plane crash as The Boston Globe was.
Websites also attract fans, mourners, admirers, fueling the individual grief from yet another direction. From Friday on, the message boards at Msnbc, Abcnews.com and Cnn.com have been overwhelmed by outpourings of mourning and admiration.
As with Princess Diana, the tone is often worshipful, especially over time, and as these images are repeated, a process almost akin to religious fervor. This isn't surprising. The tragic figure is no longer a human being with strengths and weaknesses, but increasingly like God himself, unfailingly noble, generous and decent.
This is a problem on many levels. One is that the evolution of this kind of media is tailor-made for some glamorous demagogue to come along and be instantly and globally martyred. So far, at least, we've been fortunate that these techno-tragedies have centered on people who seem benign, even good-hearted. Perhaps that isn't accidental.
Another is that the modern techno media -- increasingly owned by greedy, giant corporations -- has naked conflicts of interest to deal with when it comes to making editorial decisions about the stories they choose to cover so massively. Is the death of John Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law really the most important story in the world for five days now? This myopia is an increasingly toxic side effect of all encompassing techno-dramas.
Domestic civic discussions and issues came to a virtual halt during the year-long OJ Simpson affair. And after a year of being relentlessly bombarded by a techno-scandal, the Monica Lewinsky story, Americans were stunned to wake up and discover the Balkans at war, and us going with them. So technology becomes a potent social force as well as an agent of change.
Media executives rarely make editorial judgements for the public good. On cable news channels, tragedy - especially tragedy involving celebrity - greatly boosts ratings. Ratings equal money. Cable channels like CNN and MSNBC depend on mega-stories for audience and profitability. On cable, MSNBC in particular has become the noxious home of the techno-tragedy and scandal, increasingly melding its obsessive coverage with its online prescence. Increasingly techno-media like cable present civics as shrieking confrontations, not obviously, because it's informative but because it's entertaining. Politicians screaming about the impact of Jerry Springer on kids would be spending their time more wisely looking at the civic screamers on cable.
In an environment like the Kennedy tragedy coverage - much technology, many emotional images, no news -- the atmosphere becomes surreal. There are few facts but endless amounts of time, space, cyber and air, to fill. Yet the images are so ubiquitous as to be Orwellian.
John Kennedy Jr. and his father were strikingly different figures, historically, a reality also being lost in the overwhelming volume of coverage. The elder Kennedy desperately wanted elective office, and articulated strong political visions. His son didn't.
The younger Kennedy was not the icon, symbol, or defining personality for young Americans, especially the increasingly important and influential generation building the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Kennedy Jr. was much more of a traditional, mainstream Eastern journalistic and political celebrity. He seemed disinterested in the young's most interesting, transcendent contemporary accomplishment -- the Internet. That says nothing bad about him, but it undermines the notion that the symbolic moral and cultural leader of the next generation has been cut down in the prime of life.
Sad as it us, the news from Martha's Vineyard ultimately says more about technology than it does about any individual people.
How do we deal with the fact that the very institutions we depend on for clarity and perspective provide neither? And that technology itself is becoming the end, not the means for some of our most powerful media?
Thanks to technology, images move quickly. Truth and clarity lags far behind. When it comes to sorting out the difference, we are on our own.
What I am getting tired of is the 'wait-a-thons' that CNN (and this time ABC) put on for ANY type of 'interesting' or scandalous events. Rather than report on what happens as it happens, they pull so-called experts out of the woodwork, interview them until they are blue in the face, report that nothing has changed since five minutes ago, interview MORE people, report nothing has changed, repeat....Then after the 'event' happens (or doesn't), they sit and talk about why everyone's predictions were right or wrong. This happens for every major (US) event (and lots of minor) since the Gulf War. Report the news people, stop trying to make it.
At the top of if the JFK Jr. lunacy, they started interviewing REPORTERS who had interviewed JFK, like they were personal friends. And yes, I know that JFK Jr. was a journalist, or at least had a magazine, but I'm talking about people who have met him once during an interview.
The only thing really interesting I heard along this line was Pres. Clinton talking about a tour of the White House he took JFK Jr. on just a few months ago; in which JFK Jr. hadn't been in since JFK Sr. was shot. Everything else was kinda, well, forced.
strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
This is the thing that scares me the most about our modern media-frenzied culture; I think the trend runs precisely contrary to Katz's idea here, that what what we are seeing is the cheapening of tragedy and suffering; people are being affected "as grievously as family and friends" not because they feel somehow connected to the incident, but becauyse they have become disconnected from those that should matter to them. We have cheapened mourning and made it a media event. We think a family's suffering is something to be gawked at. So what happens when a calamity hits home? Instead of learning about grief through personal grieving and relation with family and friends who are grieving, we learn about it mostly from watching others on the far side of a satellite disconnect.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
I fear that this is becoming the case in politics, family, religion, and education as well. It's just easiest to see in a media event, er, family tragedy like this one.
-=Maggie Leber=-
I saw something along these lines on a Larry King interview clip they keep showing on CNN. Larry asked him if he remembered the funeral of his father and the famous salute.
He said something along the lines of - after seeing the image over and over again, you start to think you remember something, I don't know for sure if I actually remember that.
I had a reaction that his status as a cultural icon was invented about an hour after the first reports of his death. Sure, he was famous for being famous, I don't remember anything profound he ever said or did. He was good looking, glamorous and had a famous family. So its news when he dies (christ, he's only a couple years older than I am, I was a year old when his father was shot).
But man, I can't figure out what the overreaction in the media is all about. He's suddenly the voice of our generation and all that. Sheesh. Its a damn shame and all that this guy bit it like this, but lets keep a little perspective. Its *not* like JFK being shot all over again. That was the news story of the century. This is tragic and newsworthy, but not of the same magnitude.
I'm not confinced that technology did this as much as our society of personality worship. Sure, it makes it worse that information and images travel faster, there are more 24 hour cable news networks that dive all over this. But I think the root of this is that for some reason Americans gravitate to hero worship, and if a close-enough hero dies, it is sufficient motivation to elevate him/her beyond what they really represented so that we can enjoy bashing our chests about how much of a loss this is and how its a blow to an entire freaking generation. Bleah.
I too am too young (25) to really understand the whole Kennedy fascination. I understand the emotion, but not the "blow to a generation" stuff. JFK Jr. was famous for being famous. He never did anything great enough to justify his fame. I realize what he went through and what the entire Kennedy family has gone through, but I don't understand the entire impact of this tragedy.
Not everyone in this country is affected by these deaths. But, the media likes to do polls and gather statistics on what impact this is having on us. One of my favorite things that comes up after something like this is the whole Baby Boomer vs. Generation X thing. It's commonly known that most Baby Boomers remember where they were when JRK was shot. Most of us Generation Xers have no clue where we were when Reagan was shot. But, most of us remember where we were when we heard the news about the Challenger accident. (To me, it was devastating.)
Does this make us apathetic? No. Does it show how the media tries to stereotype everyone? Yes. That is what they are trying to do in this situation. It's easier to label than to define.
Oh my god! They killed Kennedy!! You bastards!
This reminds me of Kurt Cobain's death. A group of students in my Mass Media and Popular Culture class were discussing it (this is right after it happened), and in comes our professor announcing to all and sundry that John Lennon's death was much more meaningful and that how sorry she felt for our generation because we didn't have that kind of hero.
Um, pardon me, but I like Lennon's music much better than Cobain's, anyhow. And Kurt Cobain ain't no cultural icon, folks -- he was arguably a talented musician (though not my style), but he was no hero of mine.
Freddie Mercury's death affected me much more, though he doesn't belong to "my" generation. Queen wasn't exactly popular here post-1981 except among Highlander fans, but because suddenly AIDS is this big trendy thing and is how Mercury died, we get silliness in the same music press that used to hate Queen about how they were kind of cool after all for inspiring Guns N Roses.
That was annoying, sure, but to have the same press (and this time, with the addition of non-music folks) falling all over itself praising Kurt Cobain, who if nothing else hadn't lived long enough to create as extensive a collection of music as Freddie Mercury had, was just ridiculous.
I don't see why it's so necessary to take snapshot "icons" of a generation, anyhow. It's not like they prove anything. Lucille Ball didn't represent my mother's family growing up.
And it's all very sweet to go on and on about Camelot and the end of the era of innocence, but what this ignores is that for many if not most people, the "innocence" had been lost long ago. My parents have stories from their days growing up about mentally ill family members that they had to "hide" from their friends, hard times due to strikes, being told "your parents don't love you because they won't send you to Catholic school," putting up with "dumb Polak" slurs despite being the class valedictorian, etc.
Camelot? Yeah, sure. But what about the masses outside the gates?
It's the same thing that (for me) made the Littleton coverage so damned annoying -- "How could this happen here, in our nice white upper-middle-class suburb? We're Nice People! We are the American Dream!"
Feh. America needs to stop dreaming and wake up. The "American Dream" has never once included everyone. At best, it creates isolated pockets of "haves" that promote the illusion that everyone's got it that good. *sigh*
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today