Reminder to readers, there is an eclipse of the Sun overnight tonight, at 2:11 am EST and 7:11 am GMT. Here is an early article on the events of this week, and here is a more recent one, both from our subscriber series.
There was once a media theorist named Marshall McLuhan. He explained the propagation of the electronic media as an extension of the human nervous system. What would have been a newspaper article 50 or 60 years ago is now a constant flow of imagery, description and data. Many people would have never heard about what happened; now we follow events from minute to minute. In a sense we are getting a refined version of the pain in an extremely concentrated form.
That makes a catastrophe such as we are seeing in Haiti a very different kind of event for those who are witnessing it from afar. This will have a variety of effects: many will indulge a fascination with horror; we are also getting a look at life on the other side of the tracks.
I’m watching a live feed by NBC News anchor and managing editor Brian Williams, and Carey Sanders, on MSNBC. They are describing how there is absolutely no infrastructure, no command post, no communication center, not even a control tower. There is no functioning government. Contrast this with the way we are getting the news, through a highly organized, structured network, yet one which feeds us this imagery. It is two worlds intersecting.