NEWS! Pilot discusses Christianity && End of Privacyish

by phil on Sunday Feb 8, 2004 10:31 PM
privacy

from CNN ... pilot, whose name was not released, reportedly asked Christian passengers to raise their hands before suggesting that the other passengers should discuss Christianity with those passengers.

Ezra was like, "why the hell is this on the front page of CNN." I agree... this is not big news. But it's part of a trend for the media to take isolated incidents and blow them up for the sake of a news byte.

When they said that "in the future, we will all have 15 minutes of privacy," I think that can be extended to the locality of events.

Before, isolated events could occur in communities, and only appear in local newspapers or manifest as hair-salon gossip. Now, everybody who is in some position of social-relevance has to be cautious about "headline risk" or the idea that what they do in their small space has the greater potential to be magnified to a national issue.

The panopticon will be manifest in the media's insatiable desire to explode local news; the result is that no community is truly isolated.

Comments

Strange Loops said on February 10, 2004 4:26 PM:

In other news, on the same day a United Airlines pilot asked Muslim's to identify themselves by raising their hands. He then told the passangers that "all of you who do not follow the path of Allah are crazy" and suggested that they spend the flight listening to Muslim prosyletizing rather than sleeping or reading a magazine.

The only difference between these two stories (which miraculously happened on the exact same day) is that in the case of the Christian, people joked about it after catching a blurb on CNN, and in the case of the Muslim, the unidentified pilot was secretly taken into custody by the Joint Terrorism Task Force working with the Dept. of Homeland Security, and he (whoever he is) is now being held incommunicado in a naval brig in S. Carolina. Don't worry though - they haven't pulled a Maher Arar and deported him to Syria for torture...they only do that to Canadian citizens! Those we keep here are only subjected to sleep deprivation and psychological warfare tactics and the like.