Where's the Funny

Truthful Tuesday- I literally thought it was Tuesday today. I really need to stop being sober

Again, once a famous person dies, another meme starts like the picture above and to be honest I literally can’t stand the sentiment.

Just like when Steve Jobs died, millions of people who had used his Apple products or who were touched by the films of the company he founded Pixar swarmed on to the internet to declare their sadness at his loss, very much like when Whitney Houston died this week.

However, counter to this mourning of Steve Jobs (and now has appeared as seen above for Whitney Houston) emerged a meme, an internet phenomenon that spreads across social media like wildfire, which simply showed a picture of Steve Jobs smiling juxtaposed next to starving and dying children in Africa. The tagline read ‘One person dies, 100 million people cry. 1 million people die, no one cares.’

 The initial picture tweet was retweeted 30,000 times, reblogged over Tumblr and re-used thousands of times on Facebook and other social media websites. The message was clear, people should be looking at the more wide-spread suffering of famine that is going on in the world and this should be highlighted more than the death of billionaire Steve Jobs. The sheer volume of people who shared this image showed a wealth of agreement on this matter that Africa should be cared about more. This is a true statement of course but the avenue chosen to promote the message was distorted.

The phenomenon of using a tragedy to highlight another tragedy, or piggybacking it, is becoming an all too common occurrence online and it needs to stop. Firstly, where does it end?

Imagine this conversation:

“Steve jobs died, I’m sad.”

“You shouldn’t be because Africans are dying.”

“Yeah, well don’t be sad about that. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, that’s much worse.”

“But 26 million Russians died in WW2 so don’t care about the Holocaust.”

“Who cares? A meteor wiped out all the dinosaurs on the planet.”

“So? God destroyed every living thing on the planet except for two of each animal on Noah’s ark.”

And so on and so on.

This one-upmanship is similar to the psychology of conspiracy theorists in that it makes one person feel better or more intelligent because they are looking at wider and/or larger issue that they deem the first person is not seeing or can’t comprehend. There is nothing wrong with highlighting poverty issues, in fact it should be publicised more, but using the mourning of someone’s life to do so is a cynical way of going about it and naive of the human condition.

For what this meme shows is that the makers of the Steve Jobs/Africa picture (or now the Whitney Houston one) hold little understanding of how an individual has the ability to mourn more than one thing at a time and in doing so are belittling the intelligence and emotional maturity of the individual. Steve Jobs’ death was a shock, a sudden jolt that was heard throughout the mass media in unison so reaction comes entirely at once.

Debt and famine in Africa has been going on for decades and will continue but reaction to it is less likely to trend on Twitter or make front page news everyday due to its complexities and because it is gradual. This DOES NOT mean people don’t care, in fact, people care greatly and that is why charities such as Comic Relief and others can continue to raise so much money year on year for these causes over decades. The concern of poverty has lasted generations and will continue. Millions are raised by people for these causes and that hard work should not be belittled because people have taken time away from that to mourn the sudden death of Steve Jobs.

An individual can do both. In fact, it should be the people who made this meme, not those that mourned Steve Jobs, who should be belittled for not understanding the nature of the 24 hour news cycle of the mass media and the human condition to care for more than one cause at once.

The man who made the original image (which is now being used to similar effect for Whitney Houston) was a tweeter by the name of DJ Willie, who didn’t help in his stride for wider causes of Africa when he used his new found fame to promote his DJing career. One can only assume he will hope the people he has touched in his life would take a day away from raising money for charitable causes to mourn his death when it comes.

This cynicism over the mourning of death has become a growing trend on the internet. When Amy Winehouse died, people blasted those that cared because the massacre in Norway had happened days before. The Smiths’ singer Morrissey was forced to apologise for saying on stage at his concert that he didn’t care about the Norway killings when so many animals are killed by the food industry.

It is a thing that needs to stop; if people are criticised for mourning the loss of someone, whatever the motives may be for this criticism, then it can only cause people to shy away from publicly stating their sadness in the future and this leads to apathy.

The internet allows freedom of speech to millions across the world but it has also caused disengagement with human interaction as communications happen so often now through a computer screen, more than in person. If tragedy is not being allowed to find an outlet then this could lead to an even more disengaged society in the future and I hope people realise they are better than this.