Take the multitask to task

This past Sunday I watched the Super Bowl game on mute from a live streaming feed that occupied half of my computer screen. You could say that I was multitasking. With the other half of the computer screen, I cycled through YouTube images and film clips of the current protests in Egypt. Christina Aguilera’s lips were moving as she sang the national anthem, but the only thing audible was the call of a muezzin ringing out into the street as a group of worshippers rose in tandem from prostration. To me, that call to prayer is one of the eeriest, most mysterious sounds in the world, and to hear it coming out of the mouth of a bleached-blonde American diva was one of the most bizarre juxtapositions imaginable. For students ensconced in the Columbia community who are able to see the two at once, our experience begs the question: What is news, and what is spectacle?

Without the help of the Internet, such a comparison would seem wholly contrived, but once we have the medium to place the two events side by side, the visual parallels are undeniably real. Fans at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the game was held, rose from their seats all at once to commemorate each dramatic play, an undulating human wave of color. Meanwhile in Egypt, the prayerful, wearing business suits, sweatshirts and head coverings, rose from their rugs to march through a city swept up by riots and ungoverned by police forces. As the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers headed in silence toward the collision that would begin the game, armed supporters of President Hosni Mubarak descended upon the large group of anti-Mubarak protesters who had assembled in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the background lurked the green, boxy silhouettes of the army tanks that would intervene once full-scale violence broke out.

In spite of the attacks suffered by reporters such as Anderson Cooper in Egypt over the past two weeks and the suppression of the Internet and networking media through which protest events were organized, you can find online just about anything you would want to see. The camera lens leaves little to the imagination: bloody bodies and Molotov cocktail explosions, burning photographs and Egyptian flags, posters in Arabic hoisted into the air by shouting crowds of mostly men. Within our community, people are constantly searching the Web for new links and images, emailing and forwarding the most appalling, the most exciting, and the most humanizing parts—like those Egyptians who formed a human wall to protect treasured artifacts housed in the national museum in Cairo.

What unifies this diverse and often disturbing set of visuals is their uncanny resemblance to highlights from a feature film, or closer yet, to the on-screen replays from the televised Super Bowl. So what differentiates news from spectacle? Is it the stakes? For Egypt the stakes could not be any higher, and the riots already promise a serious ripple effect through the Middle East, threatening to dissolve tenuous alliances and treaties with Israel. President Obama publicly addressed the crisis last week, as it will certainly affect the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has directly affected several members of our community: Columbia students studying in Egypt have returned to finish their semesters abroad at NYU. But on a more immediate, short-term level, the stakes may be higher for those who have placed bets on the Super Bowl. For this large contingent of the people around us, objectively much more depended on the Green Bay Packers’ victory.

In his speech, President Obama told the Egyptian authorities to “reverse the actions they have taken to interfere with access to the Internet, the cell phone service, and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.” Indeed, the Mubarak government shut down the Internet as a riot control weapon, a scaled-up sort of police baton. But Obama refers specifically to a “social network,” undoubtedly Facebook, which protestors used to establish times and locations for their demonstrations. By invoking the “social network,” has Obama included a fortuitous plug for the David Fincher film likely to win Best Picture?

It’s easy to claim that the overcrowded communication system that is the Internet abstracts and dulls reality to the point of creating numbness. However, its visually driven format does lend itself to a global rubbernecking phenomenon where we ogle at new car wrecks on the side of the road. I think the only answer is to continue to question our reactions to new sources of spectacle as they appear, from riot to Super Bowl, and to use the tools at our disposal to probe instead of mask what is real.

Amanda Gutterman is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in English with a French concentration. The Far Side of the Familiar runs alternate Wednesdays.