11/12/2022 0 Comments Riot civil unrest cracked![]() ![]() Protesters and rioters, not government or media, owned our mediated attention, and their sense of the enormity of the crime, as well as of the transformative nature of the protests themselves, became our default reality, not just in the U.S. The video killing of George Floyd then banished the pandemic story. Covid-19, as a story, pushed Trump into the shadows and became, in terms of the amount of human attention it commanded, the most frightful event in history. This impoverishment of reality created the illusion of magnitude: Trump seemed to tower like a colossus over our lives. For three years, for example, we have been allowed to express whatever opinion we wished-so long as it was about Donald Trump. The information sphere today contains an immense universe of voices interested in talking about ever-fewer subjects. That was undoubtedly correct.īeyond offering the capacity to repurpose these images, share the catchiest slogans, and plan the next assault-all at the speed of light-the digital universe gives insurgents the chance to ride a herding effect to command attention. The Yellow Vest rebels of France insisted that, without images of burned banks and vandalized monuments, the media would pay no attention to their movement. Night photos of flaming buildings “drive the mission forward,” as one young street warrior put it. cities in turmoil, a visual argument about the fragility of government control. As I write, we are flooded with images from dozens of U.S. A photo of Mohamed Bouazizi burning alive sparked the protests in Tunisia that inaugurated the Arab Spring in 2011. ![]() Because it provides the illusion of immediacy, the visual is viscerally persuasive: not surprisingly, the web-savvy public has learned to deploy images to powerful political effect. In a real sense, the digital environment represents the triumph of the image over the printed word. ![]() Sheltered in our homes, far from the strife in Minneapolis, we have been swept along to certain political conclusions. We watch Floyd die with our own eyes and share in the anger and disgust of the crowd. One horrific video went massively viral: without this direct visual experience, it is unlikely that such a remote event could have been transformed into a global cause. George Floyd died before a battery of cell-phone cameras. Today, we swim in an ocean of information that carries us, willing or not, toward particular destinations. The first is the enormous persuasive power of the information sphere. Given the complexity of the matter, I will stick to the three pieces of the puzzle that I find most significant. ![]() Why have so many come to perceive it as a call to action? How did a local instance of apparent police inhumanity expand, with vertiginous speed, into a street revolt that has absorbed the attention of the country and the world? George Floyd’s brutal killing, coldly considered, can be interpreted in different ways. It also connected to something bigger and deeper: the tectonic collision between a public empowered by digital platforms and the elites who control the ruling institutions of modern society. The current unrest had an immediate trigger and responded to a specific grievance about racial injustice and police misbehavior. Pressure was released, explosively, the instant the lid was cracked open. The Covid-19 lockdown was a lid placed on this sociopolitical cauldron. From Paris to Hong Kong, from Mogadishu to Bogotá, an unruly public has been on the march against governments of every description. The protests that erupted after the incident, often attended by violence and destruction, should appear familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the world over the last decade. George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman ended a two-month period of induced quietude due to the pandemic, and it marked the resumption of an age of turbulence and revolt. ![]()
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