Photo by Shaffeem, (Wiki.) |
Louis Shalako
Culture
shock.
In the
old days, if a local cop got shot it would definitely make the local and
regional papers. It would undoubtedly make the evening news...in Canada,
Canada has a population of about thirty-five million. But the U.S. has a population of 330 million. Previously, if a cop got shot in San Fransisco, readers in New York probably didn't see it in the paper, because there simply wasn't room to print all of those stories.
Even a
big paper like the NY Times has only so much space and much of it will be
dominated by local news. They leave out stuff that doesn't directly interest
(or have an impact upon) their readers. The same is true of U.S. television
news. There simply isn't enough time to report everything, even on CNN or
whatever. What those guys do is cream off the top, that is to say, that which
is most shocking (multiple killings, unusual events such as well-equipped
snipers), or perhaps most relevant. The other thing is, a print report might
take up a couple of column inches: sniper
kills cops on the other side the country, for example.
It could be any kind of violence. It would still only get a couple of column inches, perhaps not even a photo. This
could never have the visceral impact of a constant bombardment of such stories.
Many
stories are video, some stories are live as it happens.
People are on Facebook for hours and hours at all hours of the day. It is a news-feed that never ends...it just goes on and on and on.
The
impression, after a while, is that the nation is swamped in blood—and maybe it
is.
Maybe it
is, or maybe this is just the first time Americans have really had this kind of
information about their country.
No wonder
they are shocked, and no wonder the extreme reactions from both ends of what
is a spectrum of public opinions.
Things
really are different now.
The difference is one of perceptions.
Now we have all this information. And quite frankly,
if a cop gets shot in some small town in Alaska, now we are going to hear about
it.
Once you have a few friends on Facebook, then you potentially have
friends all over the world, all of them literate, savvy in some degree to
social media, and active to some degree on social sharing platforms.
On
Facebook, with 1.6 billion people feeding in links, now we hear about every
shooting--and every kind of shooting. It's not surprising that people are
shocked at the level of violence. They simply didn't know that it existed
before.
It’s not
like some citizens didn’t already fear their neighbours, for their lives,
families and property.
At the
risk of appearing callous, this is social experiment on a grand scale.
And no
one can really say what the effect will be—ultimately, perhaps people will
become so sickened by what their country is and what it has become, that we
might even see some real social progress.
The danger is that all of this information could be feeding paranoia, which is never a good basis for decision-making.
END
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment on the blog posts, art or editing.