The Bold, the Bizarre, and the Blockbuster of Publicized Crises

It is the natural order of the development of any significant event occurring in the internet-dependent and inter-connected world. News sources break first, throwing the headlines on their website, television channel, or Twitter. Mortal humans read it on Twitter and then attribute the enlightening to Twitter. They share it across Facebook and so forth. One day passes and now the news market is saturated with this one topic, and many more. A single conspiracy theory arises and the rest of the sentient populace creates more. Then, an educated, trained figure within a respective field makes a rational point. And this process repeats itself with every new pertinent piece of information that surfaces in relation to the original subject-matter. The tragedy, or maybe the confusing psuedo-tragedy, at hand is Malaysia Airlines Flight 307. Each day brings a new twist and then we think "how long could it take Liam Neeson to find it". The way this kind of moment is absorbed into society these days is fascinating. As I touch on each development, I will describe my emotional state. I consider myself to be a compassionate, chemically-balanced individual but I want to be frank about the effect the neural saturation of these stories have given their spread across the Web and the culture I live in.

The first "conclusion" that remember reading stated that the missing plane must have disintegrated in the air. That is a humongous sinking feeling in the gut. Mid-air disintegration honestly sounds worse than a flat out explosion or crash-landing. A day later an oil slick was discovered of the Malaysian coast along with a piece of wreckage... however, the "oil slick" contained no aviation fuel and the debris was tied-together logs. At this point the news empires are clamoring for any relevant information. Soon thereafter, proof emerged that the plane had flown several hours further. Despite the assumption that the transponders were disabled, the plane's basic systems 'ping' satellites covering different corridors of the planet as simple "Hello, I'm functioning" kind of notification. Upon this revelation, the collective conscious of the connected world began to churn out possibility upon possibility. In all honestly, my first thought upon reading this update when it surfaced on Saturday March 15th was "this is getting cool". As callous as that may sound, we have been conditioned (especially myself, as a white male [disclosue purposes]) to easily relate these things to movies and video games. While terror-hijackings immediately bring to mind the 9-11 tragedy, something such as the MH370 situation, where a Boeing 777 seems to be straight-up stolen, I immediately thought of Flight with Denzel or Air Force One with Ford. This sort of mental association is further corroborated by the sort of crazy and wholly believable scenarios that the Internet offers.

Courtney Love wants to help.

Regardless of who actually is responsible, be it terrorists or the pilots themselves, a conspiracy theory like the "shadowing" one that is all the rage right now is enthralling. I do not even want to attempt to describe the maneuvering, because it sounds like Tom Cruise's inverted dive in Top Gun. My reaction to reading this theory was more excitement than anything, I am ashamed to say. We see the action movie plot between the lines of the dire situation for those poor souls aboard the plan. People feel a slight adrenaline rush from trying to contribute so we see social media posts of screenshots of Google Maps with circles drawn to indicate the crash site. Apparently a lot of people do not realize this imagery is not very current. Here we get some of the crazies, like Courtney Love. I reckon her heart is in the right place but her mind not as much (that's a general statement). We tend to look for suspense once one outrageous theory arises and the media may consciously attempt to fill that need through the way new developments are presented.

As mentioned in my opening, amidst the wild comes the simple. This article from veteran pilot Chris Goodfellow provides the most basic explanation of the Iron Man 3-style maneuvering the plane may have taken and the course of direction the pilot took. There could have been an engine fire and he turned the plane back to the nearest airstrip yet likely did not make it. This also presents a sad dichotomy for the public perception of the pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Most 'hijacking' theories require a very skilled conductot and so the pilot becomes the suspect. The Captain Shah is vilified as a possible terrorist. With this simple theory, the pilot displays remarkable safety protocol but could not overcome external factors.