When we tweeted the accusation that the world didn't care, many people retweeted it. But most didn't click the link to read our stories. Perhaps they wanted to be seen to care. Perhaps they believed that people should care. But they didn't care enough to read what we had written.
This really hit home. It's increasingly hard for people to truly feel sadness about these stories anymore. When continuously faced with sadness with no hope for recourse, what else would the mind do but turn away? Yet there's still something inside us that tells us we need to care about these people.

captain_nemo:

"The twisted steal the attention. And the people we should pay attention to fade into the background, bit players in a narrative wrongly and unfairly dominated by the grotesque." This line of reasoning always sticks out to me. Many journalists and online communities discuss it in the wake of the media storm for mass shootings and atrocities such as this. And yet it continues every time. The wrong-doers are highlighted and the victims are left as statistics for the story. The media continues to bring attention to the perpetrators, but also, people continue to discuss the vileness of their acts more than the tragedy of the victims and plans for aid. I don't know if this a condition of being and trying to make sense of one's own potentials or possibilities of a villain and focusing on denying the realities of that because you can quickly understand the victim, but it takes more time and discussion to understand the villain. I'm not sure I can fully blame the media for showing certain aspects of tragedy anymore. A large part of the responsibility is theirs, but they give only create for viewers, so we are the ones that are ultimately paying more attention to that side of the story and giving the media the incentive to highlight the villains.


posted 3197 days ago