What rubbernecking is to car crashes, obsessive Internet searching is to chaotic current events. After being stuck on a half-mile stretch of highway for an hour, you NEED to know what the fucking hold up is all about. Similarly, you might follow all of the recent foreign shitstorms — Arab Spring, the Vancouver Stanley Cup Fail and now the riots across England — through live blogs, online articles and Twitter. -ARVIND DILAWAR
Both rubbernecking and that kind of compulsive Googling play into the same universal sense of morbid curiosity that differs only in degrees. It’s the same compulsion that keeps TIME doing photo essays on urban decay in Detroit and keeps Rotten.com open for 15 years. It all boils down to the thrill of voyeurism, the rush that comes with looking at something you probably shouldn’t be seeing or at least shouldn’t be so excited about.
But footage of civil unrest offers voyeurs a unique kick: It reaffirms your political beliefs — regardless of which part of the spectrum you fall on. It’s like a Rorschach blotch of ideological evidence. Conservatives see the masses of masked thugs as proof of their fears: treasonous multicultural hordes and radical anarchists in our midst, all lying in wait for the chance to pillage and torch decent, hardworking society. Liberals see crowds of The Dispossessed© rising against injustice, the looting and destruction as an unfortunate, predictable, even necessary consequence of capitalistic bondage, the violence intrinsic to the struggle in breaking from oppression’s shackles.
And so everyone keeps ogling. We frantically cruise the Internet for the latest, most hardcore photos and videos from the front lines, causing our intellectual hard-ons to cum through our own mouths, spill from our fingertips as comments, tweets and, of course, blog posts. And every voyeur is pleased, confident in the course of world events at least insofar as he can analyze their significance and predict their outcome, all within his neat little dogma. As if riots had road maps.
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2 comments:
why is fire beautiful?
well said
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