In the so-called First World we went from letter writing to land lines and thence to cell phones. In the so-called Third World they skipped the land lines. So on the news we see desperate young men from North Africa clinging to a rock in Ceuta or Lampedusa. and talking to their families back home on their cell phones. I find this jarring. But I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I think it’s bad PR. But if so, is it because they shouldn’t be washing up on shore in the first place, or because they shouldn’t have cell phones when they do?

It’s one thing to grieve the loss of quaintery. It’s quite another to miss what one’ s always taken to be the thank-God-not-me telltale trappings of Third World poverty. Something similar is happening when a news segment happens to catch the city skyline from one of those, according to Trump, ‘shithole’ countries. Not a problem until it cuts to commercial, and it’s one of those save-the-children tropes. You know, the ones with the meticulously selected cherubic face to which the cameraman had applied sugar water to attract the flies. Yes, ad placement matters!

My point is that the media is a business. It has a service to sell, and that service is the stirring of the heart. That’s why we go to the movies. That’s why we watch the news. What we do about what we see, if we do anything, is entirely independent.

Human interest stories warm the heart. Human suffering stories bleed it. Human injustice stories anger it. They cathect our outrage. Very occasionally outrage moves us to act. The scenes from Gaza and Lampedusa might occasion such action. But not unlike ad placement, mise en scene matters. Why should the victim holding a cell phone put such a kibosh on outrage? I don’t know. But it does.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: cell phones, Ceuta, Gaza, Lampedusa, migrants