Over the spring break, I was in Maryland for the school shooing St. Mary’s county. I was alerted to this shooting by a news notice in the live section of YouTube. The video I first watched was a CNN live interview with a student currently inside the school on lockdown. They were on the phone for a few minutes and then the voices of the police came in over the phone. The student said he had to get off the phone bc the officers were about to escort them out of the school.
The media construction of what I was witnessing was not new to me. News television outlets have always scrambled to get victims statements even while an incident is unfolding. The layers through which I was receiving this experience shocked me.
The live news report was being funneled to me via a phone carrier, via CNN, via Youtube, via my iphone. There triangulation getting this information to me was an uncomfortable collaboration of many different corporations. The formulation of this moment is breathtaking. This collaboration has created incredible technological innovations…but in this circumstance being brought to my phone was a voyeuristic window of someone else’s fear. This was a very short clip amongst my other garbage entertainment clips on youtube. It’s not just the internet’s fault that we don’t know how to tell the difference between real news and fiction…News and fiction have been commingling in television entertainment since the 60’s.
I don’t blame the mediums themselves but I very much blame large companies for this confusion of news and entertainment, serious subjects and spurious subjects.
Also facebook seems to know how pissed I am. I wonder what the programers are thinking right now? Do they feel like they’ve been doing the right thing? That they are not to blame? Does each person operate a piece so small that they feel no responsibility nor ability to regulate anything from within?
