interesting that people, and by people i mean the twitterverse, feel uncomfortable and a little self righteous about the hierarchy of affectedness of the deaths in Norway and Amy Winehouse. Winehouse was one person, a rich celeb, a junkie, there’s no equivalence with the tragic mass murder near Oslo.
It’s of course easy to say that you are more affected or interested in one death than another, the Sunday Mirror had to make an actual call on which was more important to its readers. Early editions had the Norway story as the front page splash, with a top banner mentioning Winehouse, then interestingly for later editions they flipped it.
The fact is that there IS a hierarchy of affectedness, and it tells us a lot about our selves. We seem uncomfortable about it but it’s this:
#1 Death of young national cultural icon
#2 Death of dozens of europeans in dramatic fashion
The Sunday Mirror knows it and we know it but don’t want to admit it. He’s the kicker, have we all forgotten about the thousands of children currently dying of starvation in Somalia, of the parents killing themselves because they can’t bare to watch their children die?
#3 Death of thousands of Africans
it’s uncomfortable for us to rate these events, but deep down i think we have to admit we don’t have the head space to consider and be affected by every tragic death which occurred yesterday. 156,000 people die in the world every day, 384,000 are born.
If a close family member died yesterday, just one person, not known or loved by anyone but yourself, their death would jump to #1. It’s uncomfortable, but the hierarchy of affectedness is perhaps rational.
A thought provoking post QM… I totally agree that we lack the head space/ emotional capability to deal with the long list of horror that co-exsists in the world at any given moment…I have actually avoided the news since I first heard about Norway: choosing to close my mind to it’s occurrance as like everyone else I struggle with feeling helpless to anything to make a difference; nothing any of us can do will stop this sort of thing from happening again…
Same goes for Africa, small individual donations of course make a difference but you feel like that mythological character standing on the beach begging the tide not to turn…
As for Ms Winehouse: her death will have made her an icon: society will as ever be split between those who condemn her self destructive behaviour and those who sympathise with her addiction illnesses and will rush to purchase her back catalogue.
A few days from now a new hacking story will emerge and Norway, the famine, and Amy will be the cliched fish and chip wrappers or n the recycling bin and we will be back to the morbid watching of the media monster eating itself….