Spectacle and Media saturation




There has been a growing realization within me that to be human is to live amid images where medium is the message. There has been a general proclivity for presenting everything as a spectacle.
Well! your guess is right. I am about to write about the molestation issue involving a young drunken girl -the incident that has been giving many of us a voyeuristic pleasure.

But let me address this issue of 'spectacle' on a positive note.

When the well known Italian writer Italo Calvino remarked that Galileo is the greatest writer in Italian literature, it raised many an eyebrow. It is basically because Calvino rated Galileo over Dante and we are always under the impression that Galileo was a scientist. Even Leopardi( another great Italian writer), according to Calvino owes much to Galileo. But why Galileo? According to Calvino while describing the moon Galileo did not use language as a 'neutral utensil'. He used the language 'with a continuous commitment that is expressive,imaginative,and even lyrical'. Calvino further writes:'It is first time that the moon becomes a real object for mankind'(The Literature Machine by Italo Calvino).
In other words the moon became a real spectacle for us and both weak and strong anthropic principle
played with it. 


The issue of the molestation of a young and inebriated girl now has become a real spectacle for us. For this, of course, we have no Galileo to thank. Thanks be to the our (Visual)medias for making the whole issue a real spectacle. We are arguing till the cows are coming home as to whether it was really incumbent upon the medias to dish it out for public consumption in such graphic details. whereas the real culprit is still at large( somebody has told me that he played the role of a police inspector in a TV serial).
The issue at hand , I think, cannot be looked at in an isolated manner. It is inextricably bound up with the culture of media saturation wherein a  subject( often manufactured),right from sperm donor to a raped girl,must be ever-present to quench the thirst of voyeuristic audience.


Now you must be wondering what Galileo or Calvino  does have to do with this?


 What is the relation between the monkey, who with its prehensile tail ,before thousands of years jumped from one tree to another and the Cambridge scientist Hawking who proclaims that the moment we know why we are here, we will know the mind of God.

My dear friends the relation is those 'thousand of years'.