Are we addicted to truama porn?
by Hope
Social media’s age of Clickbait Creators and WhatsApp Warriors has raised a population of visual consumers riddled with attention fatigue addicted to the momentary highs that shock-value tactics offer as relief. And by that, I mean moments that remind us, as consumers, of, or, perhaps sadistically, confirm our humanity and emotional capacity. Modern life and its 24-hour bad-news-cycle of information overload has come with the bitter aftertaste of passivity – and so, naturally, there lies some intrigue in anything that breaks this trance: the sensationalised, the dramatized, the visual spectacle. And this fix comes in the form of trauma porn: ‘the perverse fascination with other people’s misfortune.’ (Chloé Meley)
The nicotine of trauma porn lies in its ability to cloak the darkest parts of humanity with its greatest: the instinct for survival and being reminded of aliveness and freedom by seeing others lack or lose it, wrapped up as a signal of compassion and given out as information. To explain I’ve broadly divided trauma porn into three categories: tragedy, catastrophe and car-crash violence.
Tragedy allows humans to be vulnerable, and with trauma porn, both subject and spectator are given access to a vulnerability that has become commodifiable. From plays to poetry, music to film, industries have capitalised on the curiosity that surrounds sadness. Tragedy trauma porn is so ingrained in British culture, the practise of virtue signalling has become a second nature celebration – from ‘save-a-life-in-Africa’ ads of a child drinking from dirty water rivers played between TV sitcoms to the perverted spectacle of Comic Relief as a knock-off ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,’ to the annual worship of the ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas’ single: as media consumers, there is an addiction watching and knowing others are suffering. Perhaps to confirm and find comfort in that ‘we’, as observers, are not them. And to relieve the weight of such a grossly selfish instinct, there comes a parade of surface-level fixes, not to truly remedy the tragedy, but, consciously or otherwise, to console the weight of guilt.
Catastrophe is the epitome of sensationalised, dramatized reality – it’s what apocalyptic blockbuster thrillers are made of – its essence, its genetic code, mimics pornographic climatic extremes that makes trauma exciting. There is an addictive quality to the highs of real-life catastrophe, because in the same breath and on the same screens that we watch it unfold as breaking news live-from-the-scene-journalism, we are sold the same storylines through fiction and fantasy. There is a market – whole industries – that profit from creating consumers that fantasise about catastrophe, so when it happens in real-life everyday people been given a chance to play their part in something greater than themselves. There’s no need to even go as far back as the ‘where were you on 9/11’ question to understand this, we are living the post-apocalyptic plot of the global pandemic as brought to our screens in Contagion (2011) – and we can’t talk about anything else – because it’s not just we can’t believe it, we can’t believe it’s happening to us. The same audiences of catastrophic fiction are offered the unique chance to live these extraordinary circumstances. The question of ‘what would you do?’ in alternative universes become a virtual reality, a chance to place personal anecdote in a collective experience. And it excites us in some way, because it is both rare and deeply ours. Catastrophe is a story to tell and trauma porn is how you tell that story.
Car-crash violence is the spectacle of trauma we can’t help but watch, the grossly human curiosity that leads our eyes to wonder over disaster, to see something they shouldn’t. There is something perversely sadistic in watching someone die, and yet, the whole world watched, shared and reposted 8 minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd’s murder. And yes, without that, the momentum and global magnitude of protests and calls for justice would have never been nearly as significant or widespread – but it spread because we’re addicted to the unspoken fascination humans have with gore, with commotion, with driving past a car crash that it did. Pictures and videos of trauma are intimate and evocative and have the capacity to traumatise the viewer in deeply invasive ways; they are weapons in that they play into our compulsive consumption of shock-value visual information, while reproducing traumatised spectators who identify with the victim: this could’ve been, could still be, you. In the same light that Alan Kurdi’s candidly photographed death was front page news because trauma porn sells, it intrigues those who will never identify and threaten those who do – either way something is ignited deep in our humanity and we can’t help but look, even if it’s from the corner of our eye.
With this a New World has been born, and human connectivity has been redefined. Perspective is no longer experienced in real-time through the singular lens of our immediate reality; the New World is a kaleidoscope of human experience projected through the lens of a virtual reality – created in and through social media.
Human experience is deeply emotional – as equally as we find connectivity in sharing happiness, joy, life, we also find it in sharing shock, horror, sorrow – trauma. The phenomenon of trauma porn is nothing too far departed from the life before social media – tragedy, catastrophe and the curiosity in a car-crash has always existed, has been felt by generations long before us – is primal, perhaps. But it is the pornographic element – the access, the repetitiveness, the volume and its magnitude that is new. People of the New World are trained, designed and moulded into consumers beyond the material world to also be consumers of a parallel virtual reality, one that thrives on its addictive nature. Trauma porn is no different to any other addiction. It comes with a new responsibility to negotiate in how we participate in it – to forgive and be deeply critical of how to see ourselves and others through fatality and misfortune, to be uncomfortably honest and consciously transparent with media creation and consumption; to monitor, reconsider and question how these two realities collide, to acknowledge the role personal habits play in these narratives, to initiate recovery.