Public Outrage
By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:25 AM
I realized the other day that ever since Obama won the election I've stopped the frantic politics gossip blog reading I was doing for so long. And before that, I was more into following celebrities, which I'm also behind on. So, feeling a little out of the pop culture loop, I read a bunch of Huffington Post and Gawker and Defamer. Aaaaand then I felt glad I'd been avoiding it. People are weird.
These two stories really caught my eye: Caylee Anthony Doll Sparks Outrage and Octuplets' birth spawns outrage from public. Caylee was a little girl who was killed by her mother, her bizarre murder story followed closely by the media and the public. This story tells about some company that tried to capitalize on the story by selling a doll that looks like Caylee, which plays "You Are My Sunshine" when poked. Obviously many people thought this was in extremely bad taste, and the doll has been pulled. In the other story, we hear about the public's anger at Nadya, a woman who intentionally had eight new babies when she could barely care for the six children she already had. She used expensive fertility treatments to accomplish all of her pregnancies and is apparently racking up a huge public tab at her local hospital - and it appears that she wants to sell her story and photos of her babies to make money off of her story.
These two stories say so much about the strange breaking down of barriers between public and private life, between "ordinary people" and "celebrities" - and the role the media and capitalism play in these evolving relationships. I think we're seeing for the first time that, well, we're all people, we're all the same. If your story is something others are interested in, and if the media cares to discover your story and broadcast it to the world, presto, you're a "celebrity." And then, just like Britney Spears and Health Ledger, you have to deal with the consequences - suddenly you're not just talking to ten people via your blog or something, you're on center stage under bright lights, and the whole audience is ready to pelt you with rotten fruit if they don't like what they see.
Maybe the spotlight will illuminate selfishness or insanity or antisocial tendencies that turn the crowd against you - or maybe it will illuminate your pain with such clarity that others look away in embarrassment, complaining about the lighting - or about the ticket price they paid to see you. But we're all complicit in this show, we're all buying into it by treating each other like celebrities, by shining that bright light on people and pretending for a moment that they're not just like ourselves but are somehow superhuman, objects we can manipulate with our dollars and our attention.
Here are my takeaways from this lesson in media and money and their impact on kids:
- Do not try to profit from murdered children. People will not appreciate this, and it's just creepy.
- Do not make children for personal profit (or the hope thereof). The children will not appreciate this, and neither will anyone else who sees what you're doing.
- Children are the future, and their interests are worthy of consideration - they're not just objects we can make and dispose of according to our whims.
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