The new news spectacle

In the days after the 9/11 attacks, mental health experts pleaded that the public not steep themselves and their families in the wall-to-wall footage of death and terror.

The experts explained that feasting yourself on images of traumatic events may lead to serious mental and physical aftereffects resulting from anxiety, panic and the feeling of helplessness. How many people need to hear this same message today?

Parents, especially of teens, need to understand the power of such images and their discussions. Young people at an age when social protest, social justice and poor impulse control are defining characteristics can fall victim to desperation, anger and feelings of vulnerability from seeing so much carnage.

Unfortunately unlike in 2001, parents can’t just turn off the family TV. We are almost unavoidably submerged in relentless internet news coverage and social media chatter that seem impossible to tune out.

And there’s an ugliness to it all. Though many of the millions of people captivated by the racial strife and violence roiling our country are concerned seekers of knowledge, a large share of consumers of the aftermath have contributed to it becoming a spectator event.

It cannot be overstated how important it is for Americans to understand the factors involved in the issue of how minorities interact with law enforcement. These factors are complicated by such events occurring against a backdrop of domestic terrorism.

But once you combine our need for learning and understanding with everyone having both a video studio and TV monitor on their cellphone, it starts to feel as though the information gathering has catapulted us from being a nation obsessed with reality TV to one that is addicted to real-life trauma.

Think back to the coverage of the Orlando nightclub shootings. In the profiles of those who’d lost their lives, it was difficult to discern the knowing, carefully posed images and videos of the victims from those of the shooter.

How many vain pictures of Omar Mateen suavely holding his cocked chin in front of his bathroom mirror do you remember seeing? Were they not eerily similar to the posed, self-admiring selfies that accompanied many of the victims’ stories — and, for that matter, to those our peers and our kids post to Instagram and Facebook?

It’s all part of the carefully curated new news spectacle. In years past, a big, ongoing news story was packaged by media outlets with a custom-designed logo and theme music. Today it’s selfies, social media screen-grabs, catchy hashtags and, increasingly, links to graphic live-streamed video. All the better to get you to identify with and then “share” breaking news to make it go viral.

The problem isn’t that “everyone is a broadcaster,” as Sree Sreenivasan, former chief digital officer at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Columbia University, told CBS News regarding Facebook’s live-streaming capability. It’s that everyone is a gawker.

Are the millions of people who are immersing themselves in the after-the-attack news coverage — and making themselves part of the drama by reposting the content to their social networks, expressing their exclamations of grief or outrage and then sitting back to see how others respond — really merely sharing important information?

Or is the obsessive social media-driven immersion in tragedies helping to fuel the political divides, the anger and the narcissism that contribute to yet more violence?

Even if it isn’t, is soaking up all the tragedy, clicking on endless photo galleries and videos of the carnage, and instinctively republishing or, worse, exposing your most vulnerable family and friends to them the best way to cope with these events?

We must not turn a blind eye to the graphic images and videos of these horrors or the significant issues these acts of violence uncover. But we should make an effort to consume these items thoughtfully, carefully.

Most importantly, what can you do in real life that goes beyond mindlessly reposting and becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

Esther Cepeda’s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.