Helen Walne’s Human League
On Friday night we huddled around the laptop, watching video clips of cars floating. Like a flooded garden where the flotsam of twigs and fallen petals is pushed out onto the street, the soil-swirled water turned black. Except here, the garden was a town, the twigs were trees and the petals were fallen ships and fiery homes.
We watched the water flowing towards a highway, the tiny cars in desperate flight. A lorry struggled to do a three-point turn. The wave moved closer. “C’mon, c’mon,” I murmured. “Just drive on the grass.” Drops of water flecked the camera lens. The water swept over the road, its black power engulfing the lorry. We had probably watched someone die.
We ate dinner and listened to a remix of Major Tom.
At a party later that night, the events in Japan had already been transformed into action shots: “Did you see that guy in the car?” “Apparently it was 8.4 on the Richter Scale.” “I heard it was 8.9.” “They reckon at least 2 000.” “The buildings in Tokyo were shaking.”
In one day, the disaster had become something to marvel about over wine and prawn chips. In one day, it had become information to own.
We don’t have a TV, so when news of the earthquake broke we turned to the internet. We watched footage from the BBC website and YouTube clips by amateurs, the images splattered and grainy. There were tweets and chirps. Someone had posted footage of footage: a long, wobbly video of a TV beaming out news of the event in Japanese. It all felt like a movie.
My experience of internet video-watching has usually been reserved for more entertaining action: the monkey who fiddles with his nether regions, smells his hands and then falls out of the tree; the guy who skateboards down a stair railing, wiping out spectacularly at the bottom. While it’s all real-life, the amateur nature of it makes it seem less reliable than mainstream media: it’s byte-size froth for byte-size attention spans. It’s Blair Witch and mockumentaries. It’s Facebook and bum-smelling monkeys. It’s conspiracy theories, cranks and people who can’t spell.
The challenge faced by new media lies in the fact that the digital world is democratic. Unlike mainstream media, with its bosses and appointments, its shareholders and policies, the web allows every Tom, Dick and Savannah to have a voice and an opinion – and the topics are so far-ranging that if you Goggle any two words together , you’ll get a result. Punch in “bum slugs” and you’ll get a definition from urbandictionary.com, as well as advice on pest control. Try “pet bats” and you’ll get a picture of Paris Hilton holding a pink-clad bat and a discussion forum about how many of the creatures Batman had.
Amid all this unbridled spewing by the masses, mainstream media has to adapt to and exploit the internet’s flexibility while setting itself apart from the hacks and the hackers. It needs to convince us that it’s the real deal. It needs to make us feel the effects of the tsunami instead of viewing the footage with the same kind of fascination we reserve for Charlie Sheen.
Weirdly, the first TV coverage I saw of Japan was on Sunday at the gym. The last time I had darkened the doorway of a gym, the machines still operated with pulleys and leg warmers were not ironic. Then, a man with muscles like bags of potatoes often pulled cars on weekends for charity.
Now, almost 20 years later, I struggled to stay on the treadmill while I navigated the digitised menu. I ended up running on a gradient not dissimilar to that of Table Mountain, with Miley Cyrus egging me on. No one was pulling cars, so I panted and watched CNN.
Even with the sound down, the devastation of the tsunami hit home. A clean-shaven man in a suit talked gravely to the camera while mini-headlines streamed beneath him: Death toll could hit 10 000; Concern over second nuclear plant; 170 000 evacuated from coastal town. Neatly captured videos showed smoke billowing out of the nuclear reactor and cars snagged upside-down in debris. It felt serious. It felt real. I could sense the cold and the damp, the shock and disbelief.
Perhaps I’m a lousy digital immigrant or maybe my generation is just more used to TV than Twitter, but I don’t think I’m ready to embrace cyberspace for all my earthly news needs. It’s a healthy realisation. Some people go to gym for affairs and currant muffins. I will go for current affairs.