Osama Bin Laden is dead. As soon as that news hit, people across the world took to the digital space in massive numbers to celebrate, mock, worry, and argue. Through this, we were all creating the meaning of this event.
This ability to create meaning is unique to our generation. Because of many of us can now publish to a mass audience – by posting, tweeting, blogging – we now all share the ability to shape national narrative.
So, how are we shaping it? With consideration and thought? Or with the same amount of energy we put into a tweet about how much we love Mad Men?
In the past, saying your idea to a large amount of people required money for a printing press or, more recently, connections to an agent. It took the time to write your ideas down and the expertise to hone your craft. Most importantly, it required the infrastructure to reach large amounts of people.
Now, we write down a thought within fifteen seconds and publish it to hundreds of people with just one click.
This is important to understand, because those who control what information is shared shape how we think about things. And now we all have a little bit more control.
When we publish, we state a thought to people. They then can accept, reject, or modify it. But our thought serves as a starting point for their decision process. By simply publishing, we set a frame through which meaning is created. In other words, we shape narrative even if what we publish is wrong.
So, if your wall on Facebook is filled with celebration for Bin Laden’s death, that becomes the meaning of it, even if you disagree. The argument becomes about celebration, leaving out other aspects of this complicated issue.
The narrative we all write about Bin Laden’s death will shape how we talk about our foreign policy, our future responses to terrorism, and our basic feelings on the appropriate reactions to violence – on a state and individual level. Each of us now has the responsibility for shaping that narrative.
We need to take that responsibility seriously and publish with consideration. Otherwise we risk creating a world we do not want to live in.
I was very quickly dismayed by the way humor became the reaction of most online. I understand it can be a filter through which we understand harsh realities, but I look down on cynicism when it comes to events like these and too often cynicism, however clever it may be, seems to be our initial urge.
But in all honesty, it was scenes like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nznEYspwGY
and this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl7POcfh9RU&feature=player_embedded
that started to define the meaning of this event for me. It started to be about us. I still am far from digesting it though and I don’t know if those scenes have defined it in a positive or negative way, or most likely some varying degrees of each. Right now, the meaning for me is what it’s doing to us.
This will and quite frankly should take a long long time to make sense. If it had happened in 200 or 2003 when we were all expecting it, the whole thing would make a ton more sense.
I mean some historical perspective: Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima was 3.5 years.
This took 9.75 years.
I think one of the social lessons that should have been learned from 9/11 is that we as a individuals and therefore as a people need to allow ourselves time to digest and comprehend events like these. We need time for the initial fires of gut reactions and frantic lunacy to burn out before we can even hope to accurately assign any qualitative meaning or lack thereof.
Also, similar to another lesson we might have learned (or we aspire to learn) from 9/11, I think it’s safe to say the initial meaning we glean and the deeper reality of an event are often quite separate.
Thanks, Dan, for the comment. “The initial meaning we glean and the deeper reality of an even are often quite separate.” I agree.