Yesterday in class we were discussing the differences between traditional media (TV, newspapers, radio, etc.) and new media (social media, podcasts, blogs, etc.). We talked about how 9/11 might have been different had it occured in the context of new media. The eerie, unhinged emotional atmosphere post-9/11 led to a great many tragedies. How much more tragic, how much more fatal, might it have been had we been trapped in a cycle of rumor and misinformation?
To paraphrase Vincent Bevins, new media has created a dynamic in which we read the Internet and respond on the Internet without adding any new information. In fact, we seem to have moved more toward the world as portrayed in “The Machine Stops,” a short science fiction story by E.M. Forster. In Forster’s world, people rely entirely on second and third hand information. No longer able to live on the surface of the Earth, humans live in small cells and receive everything via The Machine.
Of course, for now, we live on the surface of the Earth, and during times of insecurity and fear we often twist ourselves into grotesque caricatures of humanity.
In these days following the horrific murders of Israeli civilians by Hamas, the ambient feeling in the air is one of confusion and grief and half-hatched hot takes. Everyone scrambles to change their profile picture, to “stand” with Israel or Palestine, to “never forget.” The post-9/11 bloodlust and dehumanization has in some ways been reawakened.
In the midst of all this, I’m reminded of how Susan Sontag was excoriated for her cautionary and prophetic piece published in The New Yorker in the days after 9/11.
I’m also reminded of the self-righteous bloodthirst that dominated American discourse, and I certainly added to that shrill and murderous cry. I was 16, and obsessed with vengeance so much so that I joined the Army several years later.
Sontag implored Americans to “grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.”
I’m a pacifist now, and a very different person overall, but the politics of domination and terror seem not to have changed at all since 2001.
In the days following 9/11, a Sikh man was shot and killed in Arizona as he was planting flowers around his gas station in memoriam to the victims of the attacks. He was the first casualty of the anti-Islamic hysteria which followed 9/11. A hysteria which seems to have coalesced into a permanent presence rather than disappeared.
Now, we learn that a Palestinian mother and her son were attacked in a suburb of Chicago. The little boy was only nine years old. He was killed. This murder seems also to have been the direct result of anti-Islamic, anti-Arab madness.
The term “Stochastic terrorism” is thrown around quite often these days. Simply put, it refers to the phenomenon by which media, both traditional and new, is used by public figures to demonize a person or group to the point that some in the audience decide to take violent action. It is a call to arms with a very thin veneer of plausible deniability. Of course, we’ve had ample evidence of the ways in which rhetoric can be turned into violence.
Ultimately, as I’ve told my students, communication is far more complicated than simple sending and receiving. We have no control over how people respond to what we say or do.
And when it comes to Israel and Palestine, there is very little we can do here in the United States but there is plenty that we can say: to ourselves, to our elected officials, to our Jewish and Arab and Islamic neighbors. With our words we can do grievous harm, and there is already abundant grief. If we are deliberate and thoughtful with our language, if we demilitarize our attitudes, we may be better prepared for a future in which our capacity to do violence no longer guarantees our safety.
We may also become better people.
An Unhappy Consciousness 