Unless you’re a troglodyte, over the past few weeks you’ve learned something about the Depp vs. Like many people, I averted my eyes with guilty fascination—even as I gazed at the flames of defamation. As we all do nowadays, we watch or read or we media-graze about these private public spectacles in bits and bytes, for fear that sheer rancor and obscenity might leave a kind of virtual stench – Or, in my case, worry may be triggered by prolonged viewing. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Google: 1998.)
Today, most of us are consuming gossip, news and entertainment news in a completely different way than in the old days, from the first televised trials (Nazis’ Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann, 1961) to the dawn of Court TV. until. 1990s (Google: The People of the State of California v Orenthal James Simpson).
Instead, in exchange for watching coverage in real time (yes, John C. Depp, II v. Amber Laura Heard is available on Court TV’s website and via livestream on YouTube), we sampled the trial’s intermediary accounts on Instagram. , Twitter, and Facebook; Through memes, video clips and Tiktok nuggets. Therefore, our consumption has become biased, curated and cursory.
Social Media Encounters
What’s more, we’ve become so accustomed to this narrow, cynical cycle of social media encounters that we don’t consider the test to be sad or pathetic, but a pure car wreck: accessible, toddy, and instantly gratifying. We give up on critical thinking and turn to cheap thrills. Such scattershot consumption has not allowed for real understanding.
Instead, we experience only apprehension, knee-jerk resentment and titration. It’s like going to the opera and reading a couple of translated supertitles but not understanding Italian. And despite all that, it is a soap opera.
In this clear, visible way, I looked not through the evidence, through the cross-examination, through the summary, through the trial, but through the distorted shadow of the trial, through the lens of friends and pundits and pundits .
is reflected. And the calmer I felt about this behavior—even though millions of others are doing the same thing—the more I realized that perversion, not objectivity, had evolved into an acceptable language.
There is another complicating factor at play. Because the test is also available live on our screens, we subconsciously think that we have a right to be seen and seen.
And we see this confusing cultural crossover with two people (whom we are used to seeing as actors acting on a screen) in a setting – a courtroom. Where we usually see them as their, They will be asked to play the characters. expected to play the role.
Covid Variants
This blurring of public figures and private lives can do a lot on us – as spectators, as spectators.
We’re torn between our cross-social relationships with celebrities (we identify with them; we pretend that, gee, we really know them) and the need to take public figures down a notch or two. Need and need to be public.
We need to be taken down – so that our wounded selves feel better in comparison. As Aldous Huxley puts it in Brave New World, we’re hooked on soma, a drug that we think is making us feel better but is actually making us numb.
(Huxley, of course, won’t blame us as we move on to uncover our new world of COVID variants, monkeypox, Ukraine, politics, and mass murders.)
Also Check: Why is the Tata Power stock price not rising?
