Catastrophe: Humanity’s Voyeuristic Project
In today’s information-rich world, we are constantly inundated by the spectacle of catastrophe and disaster in everyday television and social media. What value or role does the concept of catastrophe have in determining the actions of people and institutions? As people are often moved to offer sympathy or take action in response to images of suffering, perhaps it is valuable to consider whether their intentions are a bit more insidious and self-serving. In the eerie words of Jean Baudrillard, former professor of Media and Sociology at the University de Paris X-Nanterre, “Other people’s destitution becomes our adventure playground” (67).
Although most people in our society seek to project …show more content…
Arthur Kroker, Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, characterizes our society as existing in “...the age of the bored eye: the eye which flits from situation to situation, from scene to scene, from image to image, from ad to ad, with a restlessness and high-pitched consumptive appetite that can never really ever be fully satisfied... with simply observing the power of the image, the bored eye now demands to be the power of the image.” (167). What may have begun as pure fascination with the image of catastrophe as a self-gratifying moment has transformed into an embodied necessity to partake in the ongoing creation of the spectacle itself. As a result, “Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual...in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal” (Baudrillard 57). In other words, news and media can only be considered authentic in our image driven society if it functions as a distribution channel to give people the necessary dosage of catastrophe. This explains why today’s media seems to consciously exaggerate issues and falsify stories purely for the titillation of the
In today’s information-rich world, we are constantly inundated by the spectacle of catastrophe and disaster in everyday television and social media. What value or role does the concept of catastrophe have in determining the actions of people and institutions? As people are often moved to offer sympathy or take action in response to images of suffering, perhaps it is valuable to consider whether their intentions are a bit more insidious and self-serving. In the eerie words of Jean Baudrillard, former professor of Media and Sociology at the University de Paris X-Nanterre, “Other people’s destitution becomes our adventure playground” (67).
Although most people in our society seek to project …show more content…
Arthur Kroker, Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, characterizes our society as existing in “...the age of the bored eye: the eye which flits from situation to situation, from scene to scene, from image to image, from ad to ad, with a restlessness and high-pitched consumptive appetite that can never really ever be fully satisfied... with simply observing the power of the image, the bored eye now demands to be the power of the image.” (167). What may have begun as pure fascination with the image of catastrophe as a self-gratifying moment has transformed into an embodied necessity to partake in the ongoing creation of the spectacle itself. As a result, “Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual...in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal” (Baudrillard 57). In other words, news and media can only be considered authentic in our image driven society if it functions as a distribution channel to give people the necessary dosage of catastrophe. This explains why today’s media seems to consciously exaggerate issues and falsify stories purely for the titillation of the