Talking About Talking About Talking About OceanGate

Social media, sea disasters, and how we react

Photo by Joel Vodell on Unsplash

Since the advent of social media, have we ever lived through a news story where public reaction to that news story didn’t make us angry?

I found myself thinking about this looking at the reaction to, and the reaction to the reaction to, the Titan disaster. On June 18, at 6 A. M,  the Titan, a submersible built by the private company Oceangate, departed from its support ship carrying five passengers – Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shazada Dawood, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood. The submersible then left on a private tour of the Titanic wreck. After an hour and a half, the ship lost contact with the Titan, which indicated that the Titan had either lost power or had been destroyed. This started a frantic search for the Titan in the hopes that the vessel was still intact. The Titan was built to ascend rapidly to the surface in case of disaster, but if it did, it remained bolted from the outside and could not be opened. This meant that rescue teams had about 96 hours to recover the Titan and save the passengers. 

On the morning of June 22, the U.S. Coast Guard reported they had found pieces of the Titan scattered near the wreck of the Titanic. As of writing, all five men on board are presumed dead. 

This story quickly inspired a range of reactions, ranging from horror (ninety-six hours to live in a dark, freezing tube on the bottom of the ocean) to disgust (tickets aboard the Titan cost a quarter-million dollars) to schadenfreude (evidence abounded that the Titan was a death trap and everyone involved in its construction should have known). There were also multiple comparisons to the comparative media coverage of, and search for, a fishing boat carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe that sunk off the coast of Greece on June 14. And of course, there were reactions to the reactions, between those who were outraged at the concern shown for touring billionaires, and those horrified by the lack of concern shown by others. 

Personally, whatever Twitter might say, I think it is difficult to argue that the world should have cared more about the fate of the men on the Titan. The Titan rescue effort ultimately involved both the U.S. and Canadian military, who searched an area twice the size of Connecticut for signs of the missing craft, and every stage of the operation was tirelessly covered by world media. Nor, however, do I think one could argue the world should have cared less about the fate of these men. However foolhardy it may seem to voyage in an experimental submarine powered by a PS3 controller, however ghoulish it may seem to vacation at the Titanic wreckage, however grotesque it is to have the wealth to afford a $250,000-per-person day trip, the five people who died were still humans, and the fact that they had grotesque wealth, ghoulish interests, and a foolhardy plan to get to their destination does not change that. 

And at the same time, I think these questions – what is covered by the media, and how we react to it – are worth interrogating. So here are some preliminary thoughts on the coverage of the Titan disaster, how it compared to the significantly larger sea disaster in the Mediterranean that preceded it, and how the world reacted.

Point 1: Media Coverage of the Titan Disaster Was Not Altruistic 

“Why wasn’t the loss of the fishing boat carrying 700 migrants covered in the same way?”

Let’s get one thing clear: nothing about the media’s exhaustive coverage of the Titan disaster came from a place of sincere, unmotivated concern for the people on board. The loss of the Titan submersible was always a lesson, and the passengers on board were always the object. 

Footage of Stockton Rush’s road towards the grave began to surface almost immediately and influenced nearly all reporting of this case. There was the fact that David Pogue had boarded the Ocean Titan and personally watched it get lost just last year. There was footage of Stockton Rush proudly describing the cost-cutting, amateurish ways he’d constructed his future coffin. Rush described his ship as “invulnerable,” to which a canny news anchor replied, “and that’s what they said about the Titanic.” Rush had been eager to show off his innovative new way to cater to the interests of extravagantly wealthy tourists (centering, of all things, the most famous tourist-killer of all), and every interview was positively erupting with irony as it became increasingly apparent that his innovation had killed him within shouting distance of the doomed, innovative Titanic itself.

This was a story that was always steeped in the medium of the cautionary tale. A rich man, eager to do something unprecedented, delighting in his own amateur instincts, giving the world’s most ironic interviews about the death trap he’d constructed that one day he’d die in. The coverage surely would have been more or less the same if Stockton Rush had made the first ten raptors for Rush Jurassic Park and was then eaten by them. The story affirms all our deepest beliefs about the danger of hubris, the inability of puny man to overcome the terrors of the natural world, the intoxicating power of wealth and technology, and the long shadow of Icarus flying too close to the sun. This was not a story that was reported to make us empathize with Stockton Rush. This was a story that was made to warn us about him.

In fact, if anything the story of the Titan reaffirms the lessons the culture has broadly learned about the Titanic. Pride goeth before the fall. My grandmother, who had a strong sense of the jealousy of the Lord, was convinced after watching the 1997 Titanic movie that God had personally sunk the Titanic after a White Star employee had said that “God himself” could not sink this ship. Whether this story is true is contested, but it does fit with what the Titanic has come to represent in public imagination. The Titanic is the boat equivalent of Ian Malcom warning B. D. Wong over an incubator of hatching raptors that “life will find a way.” Humans may imagine that they are the masters of their own fate, but forces in the world and in the wild will eventually overtake us all. 

“Why wasn’t the loss of the fishing boat carrying 700 migrants covered in the same way?”

Because it shouldn’t have been.

Because it would have been the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen, and we would have burned CNN headquarters if they had. Can you imagine exhaustive coverage of migrant parents being warned that the boat they were traveling on was not safe? A smuggler talking about how he’d built the doomed boat in his garage? How many costs he’d cut? 

There are moral lessons we urgently have to learn from these stories of the dangers migrants face, and the ways in which U.S. and European policy both creates and rejects them. But it is not a fable. There is no neat lesson to be learned from these disasters. Nor is there any single virtue you, the viewer at home, can practice to prevent them. 

I understand why people long for disasters involving the poor and disenfranchised to have the same volume of coverage as the Titan wreck. But the volume of coverage is inextricable from the content. There was always more to say about the Titan story, because there was always more to say about how it had come to pass, and there were always new ways to build out the story as a moralizing one. 

I am not excusing the comparative lack of coverage about the loss of the fishing vessel carrying migrants. In fact, I’m sure that I was among many who didn’t even know a massive craft of migrants had sunk until it was compared with the Titanic wreck. This is not okay. But when we are criticizing the news for the stories it centers, the content of the news is as important as the amount. In this case, it would be a mistake to assume that extensive coverage of the Titan amounted to greater sympathy for the victims. 

Point 2: Gallows Humor Has Always Been With Us

Here’s a joke I remember a kid telling in circle time when I was a third grader. “What’s the difference between Tiger Woods and Princess Diana? Tiger Woods has a better driver.”

He got in trouble, of course, and our teacher was horrified. This was only days after Princess Diana died. I don’t believe for a second this nine-year-old made up this joke himself – I am sure he heard it from a parent or an older sibling. But I bring this up to remind us of something that we seem to have forgotten since the advent of social media: Twitter did not invent tasteless jokes about disasters. It just made them public.

I think it makes sense to think of Twitter, Instagram, and other media platforms as a more visible and interconnected forms of the conversations people were already having. Certainly, information and misinformation can spread more quickly, and conspiracy theories are now accessible to the masses in a way they had never been before. And at the same time, I find it difficult to believe that dark jokes about the Titan wouldn’t have existed if it hadn’t been for the Internet. It seems to me that these jokes would have been passed along the same way the Princess Diana joke I remember from 1997 was passed along – at water coolers, at bar counters, between spouses, and on school buses.

The difference, of course, is that we now have access to a lot more water coolers, bar counters, spouses, and school buses, and so the stream of dark and tasteless jokes is much wider and more visible. I am not sure how this is morally forming us. The obvious thing to say here is that a steady stream of gallows humor at the expense of fellow humans causes us to dehumanize others. But I suspect that this may be an oversimplification. 

First of all, mechanisms of dehumanization already existed before the internet. The British tabloids were long in the habit of treating Diana as an object of desire, fascination, disgust, intrigue, and anxiety long before they had access to the internet. But beyond that, I’m not entirely sure “dehumanization” is the right word here. As Kate Manne has noted, recognizing a person’s humanity is not necessarily incompatible with treating them monstrously. We can recognize a person as a full human, and also treat them as a rival, a leach, a bad actor, and someone who needs to be punished. In fact, treating a person as a misbehaving agent who requires censure often depends on recognizing their humanity – recognizing them as a thinking, feeling, desiring, acting being. 

I think in the case of those who felt disgust for Stockton Rush and his crewmates, this is often the logic that predominated. People were not recognizing them as inhuman; they were recognizing them as humans who had made immoral choices to acquire and retain the wealth they had, spent money on the alarming act of going to the site of a massive disaster, and were justly punished by the ocean they flouted. I am not saying I agree with this moral logic; what I am saying is that, where this logic is present, there is no denying the men’s humanity. This is not the logic of dehumanization, this is the logic of retribution. 

There probably is a case to be made that the internet creates, reifies, and reinscribes a culture of retribution. But it’s bigger than this particular news cycle, and requires far more extensive moral interrogation. 

Point 3: Interest, Attention, and Concern Are Different Conversations 

To return to the question we asked in part one about the comparative interest in the migrant fishing boat disaster as opposed to the Titan disaster: is there something morally right about people following and discussing one incident as opposed to the other? 

I think it’s undeniable that public indifference to large, class-based suffering is a huge part of why indifference at the policy and political level is able to continue. However, I don’t think that this one incident – people following the Titan disaster in detail, or scorning it – is indicative of people caring, or not caring, about larger class-based issues in an actionable way. 

It is hard for me to believe, on a personal and experiential level, that fascination with the Titan disaster reveals a greater concern for the desires of billionaires than for the needs of ordinary citizens. If this is the case, I think it would require greater evidence than this news cycle to demonstrate. How many people who shuddered at the idea of freezing to death under two miles of water have enthusiastically supported tax cuts for the wealthy? Is there only negligible overlap between people who marched against Trump’s immigration bans and people who checked for regular updates for the search for the Titan? Are people who were comparatively less aware of the migrant disaster more hostile to immigrants than those who were? I find all this hard to believe. 

The image of the Titan disaster that, to my mind, holds sympathetic interest is a simple one: we can imagine ourselves in the dark and cold knowing it will be some days until we finally die. It is an exceedingly rare and terrifying way to die that plays on our imaginations and our own common experiences of small spaces, darkness, and cold. 

This image does not require any empathy with, much less endorsement of, the choices that lead one to have the $250,000 necessary to die in this way in the first place.

And in the same way, I don’t believe that people who found it difficult to empathize with (most of) the men on the Titan are generally cruel and uncaring people. For instance: A cursory glance at Twitter reveals, even among those who critique the wealth and wastefulness of a tourist trip to the Titanic, offer copious sympathetic exception clauses for 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, who followed his father onto the Titan. Even those who felt disgust and anger for the older, more experienced men who undertook this risk felt little hostility for a very young man, barely more than a child, who went as well. 

If anything, anger at Stockton Rush seems impossible to separate from sympathy for Suleman. It is one thing to take one’s life into one’s hands for the sake of innovation. Why must you take this boy down with you? 

I don’t think this is reducible to simple inhumanity to man. These reactions look multilayered and complicated to me. It is not as simple as caring about billionaires versus caring about refugees. This is about the stories and images that connect with us on an unconscious level, and the way we feel about the humans caught up in them. 

Conclusion

I don’t think it will ever happen that we are universally satisfied by our countrymen in the way they respond to the news. There have always been, and always will be, reactions we don’t understand, dark humor, and a consistent frustration towards our leaders who seem indifferent to those who need our help.

I would encourage those of you who have been troubled by these events to give to an organization that helps refugees and advocates for them. Organizations I’ve supported in the past include the International Rescue Committee and Amnesty International. You can also call your senators and representatives and encourage them to support efforts to resettle refugees in the U.S. 

As for individual reactions to the news, though, – I think policing these is ultimately besides the point. What captures our attention and anxiety is, in many ways, beyond our conscious control. That doesn’t mean we can’t redouble our efforts to be good neighbors to those who need us most.