by David HelvargPresident, Blue Frontier Campaign
Posted: March 16, 2011 10:06 AM
It may be too soon to know if the expanding global access to electronic media both new and old, from video cell-phones and Facebook to Al-Jazera and CNN, is making the world more intimate or more alienated (remember "Compassion Fatigue"). What is clear is it's collapsing the lines between reality and science fiction, between mass movements and mass media.
At the beginning of the new century many people watching images of the World Trade towers exploding and then collapsing after hijacked jetliners crashed into them were reminded of the science fiction movie Independence Day.
The Godzilla films first produced in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, with a giant reptile product of radiation stomping on its cities and using death beams from its eyes, was seen by later critics as an anxiety response to the nuclear bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War threat of an even greater nuclear conflagration. Nonetheless post-war Japan opted for an energy path that included use of "the peaceful atom," of commercial nuclear power. Now the whole world anxiously watches as an explosion rocks one of several Japanese nuclear plants that are in trouble as a result of that nation's massive earthquake and tsunami.
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