Titanic, Princess Diana & Jumbo the Elephant
How the Global Village Spawns Global Myths
by KEITH E. RISLER
Copyright © 1997, 1998 Keith E. Risler. All rights reserved.

Photo: Billed as the world's largest elephant, Jumbo was struck by a train in St. Thomas, Canada
and made headlines around the world

 WHY DID THE DEATH of a woman who was essentially a private citizen at the time of her death trigger an explosion of world news? Why does the story of Titanic never sink?

Pondering these question leads us to re-assess the effect mass communication has on our perceptions of the world around us.

After all, other major news eruptions have occurred since the dawn of electric communications technology, attaining mythic significance in themselves. Why was the Titanic such enormous news even in its own day? Why did the death of a big dumb elephant named "Jumbo" in sleepy St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada make world headlines many years ago?

MANUFACTURED STORIES
These stories appear to have been manufactured in an off-hand way by the highly competitive near-instant news dissemination that took place when the events occurred. The Titanic at bottom was just a boat motoring along too fast (something some Mercedes drivers could learn something from, incidentally). Jumbo was, well, just a big elephant owned by a circus founded on the principle that there is a sucker born every minute.

Diana, Titanic and Jumbo have something in common: They all were brought to us by communications systems that made it easy to propagate widely-appealing, emotionally-charged information globally in novel, amusing ways, all by many different news organizations competing simultaneously for our attention.

Our ability to communicate globally, and instantly, induces an occasional perceptive warp in the informational continuum. It's like a sunspot blocking everything else out.

WE HAVE NOT ADAPTED
While we value "media literacy," we have not adapted to the heightened impact of certain events that immediate global communication creates. This effect is evident in people who watch the news and conclude from what they see that the world is a horrible place that's "going to hell in a handbasket". Such people typically bemoan "Oh if only we had the good old days back," when in fact the good old days in comparison were not really all that great.

The concentration of high-impact, emotionally-charged information in one or more media, at one time, leads to a misperception of the true state of the world in which we live. That world, on the numbers, is generally safer and, overall, less violent, than at most any other time in human history. It's just that you'd never know it from the news.

This same misperception is evident in celebrities who mistakenly believe that boorish people stomping around with autofocus cameras are such a threat that one must race away at death-inviting speed to avoid being photographed. Cameras are not a lethal threat. Neither are the guys that run around with them.

This distortion of reality in terms of perception was evident in one particularly strained analysis of photographers' role in Diana's death that suggested violence is implicit in photography itself. They do "shoot" pictures, one "expert" was heard to say.

IT'S THEIR JOB TO BE IMPOLITE
Media photographers often seem like impolite slobs, because it is their job to get the picture above all. They tend to push and shove a lot, especially when they have competition, because they are competing aggressively with others who have exactly the same assignment.

Media photographers sometimes behave like mannerless bullies; literal shooters with deadly weapons they are not.

Perception is distorted at many levels by mass communication.

It is said that the people in St. Thomas spent a long time living down the shame of being the city that killed Jumbo, even though that story simply had to be the silliest, most ridiculous big news of its day. In this context we must feel sorry for Paris and the legacy that city will live with. St. Thomas killed an elephant; Paris snuffed a princess.

A very human princess died in an unlucky car crash. In the age of the global village she was deified overnight and emerged as one of the great legends of the twentieth century in a virtual instant, even though by all accounts her own plans foretold her eventual retirement from public life.

Has communication at the speed of light enabled myth-making to go global? In the age of global communications are we seeing the rise of globally defined myth, just as non-technological societies had their own, often unique mythic structures? The thought of a gaudy pantheon populated by Elvis, Marilyn, and Diana is a little disconcerting, at first.

A NEW, SECULAR SCRIPTURE?
Our discussion of myth in this context is not a reference to the common, popularized understanding of myth, which is somewhat negative and not the focus of this discussion.

Our reference is to myth in the more literary, cultural sense of the "secular scripture" so often written about by the late Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. This discussion invokes myth as that set of commonly recollected stories that form the social, cultural, and political blueprint for every civilization.

In this more elevated context, the world could do worse than to idolize the late Princess Diana, a very human person who taught us that maybe it is time to replace an old myth or two with something new and hopefully improved.

If we have to live with this kind of undirected, periodic media myth-making--and it seems we do--Diana may not be a bad model. She set new standards for people in high places, very down-to-earth standards, that will be highly valued for a long time to come.

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