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How Social Media Turned the Titan Tragedy into Entertainment
Where’s the empathy? Totally missing. It couldn’t compete with the entertainment value of the Titanic, a lost sub, and wealthy explorers. It made too good a story for social media to resist.
KEY POINTS
- Disasters capture attention but stories keep us coming back.
- The Titan incident had all the elements of a blockbuster movie, it was too much for social media to resist.
- Social media is attention-driven and rewards extreme content and conspiracy theories.
- Continued speculation perpetuates the increasingly archetypal narrative, independent of actual facts.
The Titan submergible went missing on its way to take five people to see the wreckage of the Titanic. The navy reports it suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion,’ and the five passengers are presumed dead. This is a tragedy. People are grieving. Rather than compassion, however, social media and mass media turned this into an entertainment event. Opinions and theories have erupted from uninformed and misinformed armchair experts and savants. The salaciousness of social media posts puts a real burden on mass media, which gets dragged into the fray to maintain viewership. Compassion and empathy are thrown by the wayside as people point fingers of blame, share their…
