“You smell that?” “No. What’s it smell like?”
“Trash. Did you see those people on the news?”
“Horrifying! Absolutely sends chills up my spine.”
The inside world of the human body is so closely connected to the world outside of the human body that in the instances of feeling and sight, hearing and smell, we often assume that everyone, and some things that have become human-like in our minds, around us feels, sees, hears and smells all that has affected our sensations. When we’re bitten or stung by aggressive insects or arachnids, we instantly assume in screaming “A damned bee just stung me!” that everyone else in the vicinity understands the hot, needling feeling of the sting and the subsequent swelling that will come about. In our heads, certainly at a subconscious level, everyone in sight has been stung by a bee at some point in life and should be empathetic to our pain. The people who have never been stung may react to our pain with something like “Looks painful.” or “Sucks to be you, buddy.” It’s a transference of feeling, a reflection of perception, an enigmatic and simultaneous seeing and being seen, that allows “that which looks [to] also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking.” (162) We feel pain and see, in our minds, others feeling pain, even when they’re not feeling pain and vice versa, to not be in pain and to see others in pain and transfer, imaginarily, their pain to ourselves. It’s the same with smells (“You smell that?”), tastes (“It’s delicious! How can you not like that?”, sights (“You saw that, right?”), and sounds (“Where’s that sound coming from?” “What sound?”).
We’ve all seen reactions to “2 Girls 1 Cup,” and, if we haven’t, we may have seen the clip from Family Guy in which we see Stewie’s reaction to it. Those of us who haven’t seen the actual footage can empathize with people whose reactions we’ve seen and know that they’ve just forced themselves (There’s always the option of turning away.) to endure something disgusting. The reactions of real people who’ve posted themselves on YouTube and MetaCafe are frame-by-frame nearly identical. If we were to watch “2 Girls 1 Cup,” our reactions would almost certainly match, which is the point of the “joke,” unless you’re a fan of scat porn, at which point there is no joke.
The traditional news outfits (MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and the like) attempt to exploit eye and mind perception to get us to keep watching, but they fail to grasp our attention most of the time because most of what they’re allowed to show doesn’t allow for the mirror image to pull us in closer to the television screen. For instance, when there is a murder, the news can’t show the dead body. They show crime scene tape and maybe the chalk outline of the victim. We understand that something bad happened, but we can easily turn the channel to Jeopardy and answer a few of Alex’s questions. Where traditional news fails, independent news outfits—people with cameras and camcorders on their phones—thrive. That’s why we’re glued to the television when the traditional news gets footage from the ground from Syria and Iran from the Arab Spring and from New York and Oakland from the respective occupations there. We see people being beaten and shot with rubber and live ammunition and we empathize with them. We feel their pain and so we talk about it. We get worked up over it. We write about it. We think about it. Some of us do something about it...and some of us end up feeling the same way: rubber bullets in the ass and casual pepper spray in the eyes...and still triumphant because our will to fight isn’t broken (just a couple of our ribs). We may look at others and ask, “My ribs or your ribs?” “Our ribs. I feel it, too.”
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