Mass Culture & the Public Sphere: Aurora Shooting

It was late Friday night , July 20, 2012 when a masked gunman forced his way into an Aurora, Colorado Century movie theater  with an assault rifle, handgun, shotgun and a few smoke grenades, he then opened fire on the crowd who was there to watch the premiere of the superhero movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.” I was flipping through the cable channels and saw that many of the news channels had breaking news headlines, “Aurora Mass Shooting”, at the same time I was on Facebook and many of my friends had already updated their statuses saying, “RIP TO ALL THOSE WHO DIED IN THE AURORA SHOOTING.” As well on Yahoo! the main headline was about the shooting.  Turns out the gunman, James Eagan Holmes, was a white graduate student who had just gone on a shooting spree killing 12 people and injuring 58 more. I was shocked and actually a bit frightened about the whole thing.  My information came from two media forms, the internet and television.

Since we live in the 21^st Century we are able to receive information about anything happening in our world within minutes of an event occurring. This is what the internet and television can do. They allow us to engage in what is happening around us. We no longer have to wait and read the newspaper in order to be informed. In a sense we have the world at our fingertips. As stated by Marshall McLuhan, “medium is the message.” In the case of the Aurora shooting, many of the television channels were showing the same thing over and over and over again. The main thing being shown was an aerial or ground level shot of the theater from outside with a big barricade of police cars surrounding the entire theater. After a while of seeing the same images I became” bored” about the whole thing and didn’t feel the same emotion as I did when I first heard about it. It wasn’t until a few days later that I saw a clip on a website that someone captured on their phone of people exiting the theater with blood all over them. This one clip put things into perspective. The visual of seeing blood and the expressions of fear on the people made me realize, “Holy shit! This happened!” Also the way people who were being interviewed explained how things went down in the theater and their recall of the event made me feel as if I was actually there, as if I was one of the people sitting in the theater witnessing the bloodshed. As compared to reading about it in the newspaper I don’t think I would have had the same reaction. I think that the internet and television and depending on the visuals we get from them allow us to really experience what is going on.

Although media forms such as television and the internet can be useful in order to illustrate an event I think they can also be detrimental to us and our knowledge of what’s going on. One of the things that I don’t like about television is that sometimes news companies are so eager to be the first to cover the story that they don’t know all the details, which leaves us in a state of confusion. We get one story, then a few minutes later it’s updated and it just goes on and on until eventually, we get the whole story. I feel that television and internet can be detrimental, especially in an event like this, because the constant bombardment of images like those of James Holmes’ face makes it seem like the media is glamorizing him and what he did.  Along with not having accurate information and sometimes almost glamorizing events and the people who participate in these events, these media forms can be biased and sometimes misleading. For example, one of the biggest things that really bugged me was that the media described Holmes as being “mentally unstable”. Okay, he probably is but had it been a person of color they would have immediately been labeled as a thug or gang member. Yet, when a white person commits such atrocities they’re labeled as “troubled” or “mentally unstable”. It’s almost as if the media itself is giving Holmes’ an excuse to why he did it. This leads me to my next point, the internet and television doesn’t allow us to analyze and question what is being televised to us, it doesn’t allow us to think for ourselves. Instead we just repeat and accept what we are being told.