When They’re Like Us…
…It hits harder.
I know it shouldn’t be so. I know it’s tribal-think, and completely opposite the democratic principles these people are fighting for. But I’m willing to admit that it’s easier to root for folks you can relate to, at least a little bit.
Long ago, stories of faraway wars were fantastic, mythic, or simply unheard-of. Reports took the form of tales about foreign hordes with fantastic leaders; and later, rogue armies with savage, gifted captains.
In the West, this mentality shifted in the 300 years spanning the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Peasant revolts, the printing press, and struggles for religious and national self-identity combined to produce a trend of mass action, running parallel to traditional war. Event leaders still rose to the top, but the strength of the mass actions lay in their sheer size and voluntary nature.
Photography changed the game again. In its infancy, its cumbersome equipment and setup meant few spontaneous action shots—let alone photos of unplanned demonstrations. Photography evolved hand-in-hand with mass-produced news media; and before a century had passed, the average person was able to see, for the first time, large groups of human beings gathered in unauthorized protest.
Film and television took these motionless images of massed human figures and animated them. No longer a static sea of blurry faces, crowds now moved and shifted like schools of fish, their physical and psychological evolution visible to the cameras pointed at them. The world heard, for the first time, their distinctive roar.
I’ve watched politics for twenty years. Even in that brief span, I’ve seen changes in the portrayals of foreign conflicts. Each new medium caused mass movements to alter their self-concept and tactics. The printing press mobilized them. The camera humanized them. Television validated their power.
But even in my childhood, in the early 80′s, they were still a shapeless mass, hollering incoherently at desperately-objective foreign news cameras. They were still Somebody Else.
I’ve watched that change.
Put the cameras, the camcorders, the microphones in the hands of people without press credentials. Give them an electronic uplink to transmit what they record to the rest of the world, and you have something absolutely new in the media: a crowd of individuals.
It has taken millennia, but we are in the process of animating ourselves to ourselves. Our human record has gone from excitingly mythic to excitingly real. These plastic and metal gadgets, so easily pointless, contain also the potential to transform our species’ self-image. This network of wires—so shaky, so flexible, so lighting-sharp—might often hold up a mirror to the worst in us, but it also shows us the best.
A heavy tide…not of bodies or faces or hands, but of people. That’s far more beautiful and dangerous.
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