While we watch from our monitors, a whole new genre of news story is emerging from the intersection of technology, morality, and humankind's tragic ups and downs.
I call it the technotragedy, a class of news event with enormous implications for journalism, politics, and the digital culture.
What constitutes a technotragedy?
It involves loss of life, one or many.
Technotragedies are caused by events that are not immediately clear or comprehensible, involving technology with often unknown capabilities. They tap into our propensity toward paranoia and fuel our lust for conspiracy.
The technotragedy evokes our profound hubris and ignorance about technology, either because we expect technology to bring an instant solution, or because we suspect technology of being culpable in some way.
It involves vivid, sometimes disturbing imagery - videotapes, radar images, satellite pictures - that often brings us face to face with realities for the first time.
Technotragedies are now among our biggest, most continuously covered events. They pose new challenges for government; they lend themselves to paranoia and conspiracy; they capture the public imagination. They are addictive because they are puzzles and problems.
They raise elemental moral questions about our time's most interesting and controversial phenomena: the evolution of technology, its limits, and its meaning. Hypnotic and irresistible, they can transfix, distract, and overwhelm us.
The sinking of the Titanic was a technotragedy of its time. Now, nearly a century later, it has risen again, this time in the form of the most expensive movie ever made.
TWA Flight 800 was a technotragedy, like the Pan Am disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland, before it. The Heaven's Gate mass suicide was a technotragedy, along with elements of the Gulf War, especially the aerial bombings and missile strikes. The O. J. Simpson trial had many elements of a technotragedy. And the Unabomber killings, of course. And most recently, the disappearance of an A-10 subsonic fighter plane over Colorado.
Media transmit technotragedies like stunned children - ideas, information, and theories move at lightning speed via TV and the Internet. Until the spread of news via screen technology, tragedies like plane crashes usually lasted only a few days; there was nothing else to fuel them and keep them going. Now, technotragedies take on lives of their own, like living organisms. They endure for months, even years, as images and theories move across the synergistic media spectrum of books, TV, movies, radio, the Net, and the Web.
Some of our most enduring and haunting stories involve technological drama or mystery. Was there another gun on the grassy knoll? Was the DNA evidence at the Simpson trial reliable? Did satellites pick up missiles hurtling toward TWA Flight 800? Was the Titanic unsinkable? Could it have been saved?
Americans worship technology, often attributing to it the power to accomplish almost anything. But they are schizophrenic about it, too. They marvel at the tiny piece of metal the FBI found on a Scottish farm that led to the indictment of two Libyans for murdering the passengers on Pan Am 103. Then they become angry and impatient - and paranoid - when the FBI can't immediately explain why a jet exploded and burned over Long Island Sound. They are suspicious when technology works, and sometimes when it doesn't.
Meanwhile, the ability of the Net and TV and other new-media technologies to transmit accusations, theories, and new kinds of medical and social problems rapidly results in few filtering mechanisms to temper or balance the suspicions of paranoia and conspiracy that radiate around these stories. So technotragedies are pumped directly into the consciousness of news consumers.
These stories drown out most other kinds. Few political statements or civic events can compete with pictures of TWA Flight 800 burning on the ocean, or with live testimony from the O. J. Simpson trial. Technotragedies, from hurricanes to the A-10, are now tracked second by second on the Net, as well as broadcast live. We can see tornadoes moving toward us on live weather sites, exchange theories about how an Air Force pilot could vanish with his plane. Our common civics, from congressional debates on C-Span to live presidential press conferences, seem (and are) tepid by comparison.
