A race against time with live updates. The drama of Titan, the OceanGate submarine exploded at a depth of four thousand meters, keeping the world in suspense for more than three days. To try to save the five hapless crew members, state-of-the-art rescue operations were launched, resulting in unprecedented media coverage of the drama.

Many noticed, before and after the epilogue, an asymmetry between the story of the submarine and the daily drama of the migrants on the Mediterranean routes. In fact, a few days ago, another shipwreck occurred in the waters of “Mare nostrum”, this time near the coast of Greece. The death toll is dramatic: 78 official dead and hundreds missing in what is one of the worst tragedies in the Mediterranean, according to the EU. We are talking about men, women and children who set out from Libya with the dream of a dignified life. Better: than a life worth living.

So why did our attention differ in the face of two different sea disasters? Why didn’t the tragedy of hundreds fleeing war and starvation mean the same as five wealthy millionaires determined to visit a 4,000-meter-deep wreck at their own expense?

The urge to submit to moralism is strong, but I don’t think it gets us very far. If the two phenomena were (undoubtedly) viewed with differing media attention, it certainly depends on the mechanisms involved in the concept of “newsworthiness”: but these mechanisms derive only in part from the agenda that the media dictates to us on a daily basis. basis.

habituation effect

An insignificant, but not so much, first observation is that we cannot ignore the cognitive mechanisms that regulate our attention. Psychologists have been talking about a phenomenon called “information overload” for some time. We can translate this into Italian with “cognitive overload”. Every day we are flooded with information we cannot process, a dynamic triggered above all by digitization and the emergence of social networks. As a result, we find it increasingly difficult to focus our attention. Our use of news follows this assumption. We have been witnessing massacres in the middle of the Mediterranean for nearly thirty years, and we often feel helpless in the face of a phenomenon that we know we cannot manage or control.

On the other hand, we are faced with an unusual story in which five people were stranded at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine that we did not know existed. The novelty effect is obvious, and it is innovation, not repetitive events, that grabs our attention.

This dynamic has nothing to do with the importance of events, morality, morality. Instead, it’s about how our minds work and how it will evolve in the age of “mass distraction.”

We draw your attention, “a master who bites a dog” is more relevant than “a dog that bites its owner”. Yet while the first is news, we can learn a lot about our relationship with these animals by analyzing the many statistical significance of the second fact. With the necessary (and respectful) differences, our cognitive response in the case of Titan and the immigrant drama is very similar. Are we sure that our interest would be the same if there was a submarine disappearing at a depth of 4,000 meters per month?

Identification with victims

Another thing is that even though they are far from our lifestyles (and economic possibilities), many have seen the story of the five people lost on Titan much closer than those of the victims in the Mediterranean. Reason? First of all, it is easier for us to identify with western tourists (even if they are very wealthy) rather than refugees from parts of the world we think are far from war and starvation. Even if they are on the other side of the same sea where we go on vacation most of the time. It is certainly not an educational mechanism, but it is a modality well known to the social sciences.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his article “Foreigners at the Door”, states that the reluctance or indifference towards the fate of immigrants also stems from a kind of “projection” that many people make consciously or unconsciously. We avoid the tragic stories of immigrants because we project our fears onto them, fears of a society and forces that we think we can no longer control and that one day may demand the bill from us. Unconscious fear is the fear of being “contaminated” with poverty, mourning, and misery.

A story to be told

In the case of Titan Five, this fear is absent. Instead there is a dynamic very similar to the release of adrenaline. For five days we are in the same situation as when we are watching an accident live: we want to know how it will end and whether people in danger will be saved. We imagined how five people could live inside the tiny submarine that was running out of oxygen. This is the real hook that sticks us to TV screens and the internet. Once again, it’s a very common cognitive dynamic: the same thing we can observe on a small scale in the most extreme social challenges spread across TikTok or Youtube.

We had a dramatic example of this in Italy during the tragic accident that took the life of little Alfredo Rampi in Vermicino in 1981. There was no internet and no news channels, but the scope of the drama spread everywhere: all of Italy was suspended for three days to see if little Alfredino could be saved.

Another element that should not be taken lightly is the narrative. Our minds are fed by narratives, thanks to stories, we can make sense of the past and the future, and direct the flow of time. Mediterranean tragedies often consist of numbers. We know that behind these figures are the bodies of women, men and children, but we do not know their stories. And without stories, it’s very difficult to feel emotional involvement. However, we knew a lot about Titan’s five crew members: for example, the story of a 19-year-old boy who was horrified by the experience and left only to please his father.

Finally, there’s the charm of the “Titanic’s curse.” Something very similar to the “cursed stories” that we have absorbed since childhood. And director James Cameron, author of the blockbuster movie of the same name, remembered the sinking of the transatlantic ship and how little his lesson had taught. The story of the little submarine has also drawn the magic of exploring the unknown and science fiction from the early 1900s. In the drama of the quintet many found echoes, for example, in the pages of Jules Verne’s masterpiece “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea,” a book that shaped our imaginations. In short, we’re talking about multiple levels of narrative that combine to bring attention to the story.

But are we sure it’s not the same for the immigrant tragedy? Among the shots that no one will forget, there is a child’s corpse lying helplessly a few steps away from the waves. His name was Alan Kurdi, he was Syrian and he was only three years old. She was found lifeless on a Turkish beach on September 2, 2015, and her story brought the world face to face with the immense tragedy of migrants and the Syrian conflict. Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her doors to one million Syrians and this photo cleared up all the controversy.

Because Alan has a story, a face and a body, it touched our consciences. He could have been our son, he had the misfortune of being born in the middle of war on the other side of the Mediterranean. It was neither a number, nor one of those invisible Fields in the Mediterranean that died over the years because of our indifference. Because whether we like it or not, our minds are fed with stories rather than scattered data. And that’s what separates us right now from machines, even artificial intelligences that are making huge leaps. And if we don’t want to find ourselves fighting against windmills like Don Quixote, we’d better remember that.

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