Douglas Rushkoff wrote a very interesting essay back in August of 2005, discussing how suidicide bombing is a media virus. The media virus concept is something he discussed in a book of the same name in 1994. It offers a very interesting model of how ideas/trends/behaviors spread through a culture through media.
The essay is a quick read. Here’s an excerpt:
Media viruses … depend on our newly complexified mediaspace to exist. Like biological viruses, they have two main components: a sticky outer shell, and genetic code inside. … The virus replicates if its code can successfully interpolate itself into the confused command structure of our cell’s own code. If the virus succeeds in doing this, it turns the cell into a virus factory — the cell commits suicide in the viruses[sic] name. Early Madonna successfully challenged our faulty, confused, and unarticulated notions about female sexuality. The Rodney King tape successfully challenged the unarticulated rage at the way white cops treat black inner-city men. The viral code replicates as long as we’re unable to talk about the underlying social agenda it provokes.
Suicide bombing is a media virus with very real effects. The sticky outer shell is the event itself — a suicide bombing gets covered on the news. It’s huge news, especially if it occurs in a white western nation. Currently, it’s the fastest spreading kind of news story there is.
The code, like that of any successful media virus, challenges the unarticulated confusion over the relationship of the west to oil, Arabs, Islam, and post-colonialism. Actually, the virus fuels itself on rage going back as far as the Crusades, or certainly since the imposition of CIA-sponsored dictatorships.
When issues remain closeted, culture-wide cognitive dissonance only increases. This makes everyone susceptible to the contagion of a virus whose code can nest within this highly charged gap. For a select few cells within the cultural organism, this means becoming a suicide bomber oneself. For others, it means seeing suicide bombers around every corner — as the accidental death of a Brazilian man in London, thought to be a suicide bomber, confirms.
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