mrt, Adorno and Horkheimer, 10/31

     I was looking through my notes from last Thursday's class on Adorno and Horkheimer and came across a line that said "mass culture gives tragedy permanent employment as routine" and for some reason, it really caught my attention. I think it's interesting to consider this point through the lens of modern news coverage, especially in the United States. I would say it's almost impossible to go on social media for more than a couple of minutes without catching wind of some horrific story that will be hugely talked about while it's "trendy" and then largely forgotten by mainstream media. I think people are almost addicted to the terror. Why else are our feeds so saturated with death and tragedy.

    It is almost like the car wreck you can't look away from. You know its going to be gruesome, but you can't help but slow down and stare as you drive by. As sad as this is, I think the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last year is a great example of this. People loved to talk about and share videos of the real-life trauma black people actually have to live with on a day-to-day basis and then a few months later it seemed like mainstream media had completely forgotten about it and moved on to the next tragedy. I think it's horrible that these awful events that have affected real people are used almost as clickbait and then completely disregarded when they've lost their 'appeal'. Gabby Petito is another interesting example of this, for weeks I couldn't go on my phone without seeing some breaking story about her case (missing white woman syndrome was definitely partly the reason for this but I'm not even going to get into that) and I feel like lately, I've seen virtually nothing about it. But, the coverage of Gabby Petito's story hasn't stopped, I found 2 stories from the last 24 hours, but now that it's not trending it's only shown to those who go looking for it--I find that odd. It's really scary how pain and tragedy are used as entertainment and a way for these huge media conglomerates to get even richer. 

Just as an experiment I wanted to go on Twitter and see how long it took me to come across coverage of a tragedy. I came across a link to this story in under 10 minutes.  link to media