Terrorism as a Media Event

Carolyn Guertin gets right to the point in her 2007 article about violence. In her first paragraph, she argues that the media has dramatized violence, namely murder-suicide, and in doing so, murder-suicide has become fashionable and newsworthy.

By utilizing technology, suicide bombers can easily spread fear. Not only that, but the press that suicide bombers receive catapults them to celebrity status. This, according to her argument, is the reason people yearn to blow themselves up. It’s “the sole crowning achievement in and of itself.”

The above claim needs analyzing because Guertin seems to imply that technology is the reason that suicide bombings became a tool of extremists. While suicide attacks increased in frequency in the last decade, the tactic has been employed since WWII with the Japanese kamikaze pilots. Suicide attacks as we know them today, where a bomb is attached to a person and detonated in a densely packed area, did not begin until the 1980s.

Violence and the Media

This simple history of suicide attacks demonstrates that even before the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle extremists used such attacks to strike fear in people. However, since the advent of the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle suicide attacks have greatly increased.

So Guertin’s claim is partly correct in that extremists have capitalized on modern technology to inflict fear through murder-suicides. Although the use and idea of suicides attacks predates the Internet, and therefore, fame was not the original reason that people blew themselves up. It should be argued that in the case of terrorists they do not care about fame. They care about spreading as much fear as possible, and the media and technology allows them to do just that. 

Guertin’s continues her argument by tying media and guns together. They are both forms of violence. Guns kill people and the media broadcasts the killing. It’s this culture of violence that causes people to harm themselves and others. It’s this culture that allows attacks of terror to become a media event.

Technology in the form of violent movies and videogames are blurring the line between fiction and reality. To demonstrate this point she discussed Second Life. However her discussion seems inept in that it leaves much to be desired. Second Life is an online world where even big corporations exist. How is that relating to violence exactly?

Guertin uses a Columbine-inspired video game to argue that videogames are not the problem but a symptom of the disease that is the violence-filled media. Violence manifests itself everyday in advertising, TV shows and the Internet. It is nearly impossible to escape violence for even one day unless a person completely eliminates technology from their lives. But in this technology saturated world, is that even possible?

The argument is made that by living in the virtual world, as opposed to the real world, people are becoming filled with rage because they are bombarded with blogs laden with resentment. Resentment infiltrates quickly encouraging these feelings of rage. 

Thus, the technology-overloaded world runs the risk of becoming a world filled with only “Armies of One” where people only care about themselves and are suicidal/homicidal tendencies. Whether or not this is true will be decided in the next few decades.

Violence is certainly a problem, but I highly doubt that this culture of violence will evolve into "Armies of One."