Those affected by DANA a month ago in Valencia immediately expressed their anguish. Always in shocktheir houses and streets were full of mud, many bodies were still missing among tons of mud, running water and electricity were missing in many houses. Among all their emergencies, they highlighted one of an immaterial nature: “Don’t forget us”. Yes, send us water, machines, soldiers, but above all: don’t stop looking. They knew that the journalists who landed in the region would eventually leave and that the television news would stop broadcasting from there. They told us: ok, we accept it, the disaster creates an audience, but the emotional impact of the images of the tsunami in our streets will disappear long before our misfortune. When this happens, don’t stop looking.
They demanded that the relentless infotainment law not be applied to them. They feared the moment when editors would say “that’s not interesting” and charlatans would no longer find lucrative fodder for their hoaxes. Being fodder for misinformation is hateful, but it at least means they’re paying attention to you. Even if you haven’t heard of the spectacle society, haven’t read Guy Debord, and know nothing about infotainment or the attention crisis, everyone knows intuitively how its mechanisms work. We need attention so that our problems can be solved. But it’s impossible to overwhelm viewers with the same problem in the long term. The Valencians knew that their pain spread on the networks would at some point give way to the next show.
