This Seat Is Taken

The Paris Attacks, Social Media, and Human Behavior (on Airplanes)

The OMGs are always quick, but this time, they seemed especially so.

It was a Friday night, and the only people who knew what had happened in Paris were the people who were there. But that didn’t stop the social media machine from whirring into service. Such is its nature: always on call, never fully asleep, like the best (or worst) kind of volunteer firefighter.

Next came a brief pause — a refractory period, if you will — while the Twitterers and Facebookers recovered from their first ejaculatory salvos and waited (we hoped) for something like the facts of the matter. Those facts were gruesome, as we all know by now.

Then, the machine went back to work. For some, this meant a call for religious tolerance: we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that all Muslims are evil. For others, it was a call for outrage: HOW DARE THESE PEOPLE MUCK UP THAT CITY I SAW IN A MOVIE ONCE!

The call that caught my eye was the one that wanted equal treatment of all catastrophes — the one that wondered why people weren’t talking about similarly tragic bloodshed in places like Beirut, or Baghdad, or in the Sinai Peninsula, where only two weeks before, 224 innocent people died en route to St. Petersburg.

This call caught my eye because it matched with something I was thinking about when the news from Paris began to leak out and all those well-meaning folks started airing their emotions. I couldn’t help but wonder why this one. Why Paris, when there have been so many others — when there are so many others, almost weekly.

Then I got on an airplane, slipped into my window seat, and watched as a man pointed at the seat next to me.

This man was about to teach me how current events like the Paris attacks now work: by enveloping us so fully that we can think of nothing else, like we’re in the window seat, they’re in the middle seat, and all we want is to be done with this flight.

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Thanks to hashtags and remote controls and Facebook algorithms, we are no longer subject to the newsmaking whims of Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw. We can get our news from CNN or CNBC or The Daily Show or Bill O’Reilly or Scott Van Pelt or the Twitter feed of Kanye West.

We Like the stories we like, we ignore the stories we don’t, and pretty soon we’ve created our own realities, curated by ourselves, for ourselves. This is the echo chamber social media helps create — an echo chamber that keeps us insulated from everything but whatever is on the tips of our friends’ tongues (or fingers), just as the window seat on an airplane keeps us insulated from everyone but whomever sits down three inches away.

Consider: under normal circumstances, you’d probably never have reason to interact with a bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma. But book the right flight on United and it won’t be long before all you can think about is the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma: what he reads (not books!), what kind of gum he chews (or doesn’t!), the way he smells (not great!).

After 30 minutes, you know more about the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma than anyone but the wife he had for seven good years, five bad ones, and two that were somewhere in the middle.

He’s been delivered into your live newsfeed, to the detriment of your exposure to anyone else on the plane. In 9A, the last remaining home economics teacher in the state of New Mexico, a graduate of UTEP who might have taught you something about the cultural importance of cross-stitch. In 2B, the former assistant secretary to the ambassador to Croatia, a lovely gay man who might have taught you something about fine dining in Split. In 19C, the first person to breed Abyssinians in all of the lower 48 states, a half-Venezuelan who might have taught you something about, well, breeding cats.

Even though these are the sorts of people who might have expanded your intellectual horizon by reminding you that there are viewpoints other than yours and those held by the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma, you will never know them.

You will, though, know the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma.

But you will only know him for a little while.

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When your plane lands, the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma will give you his card. You will tell him that you will “keep in touch.” But this is probably not true. You will probably not email him.

In fact, you might wonder why you engaged with him in the first place, because talking to the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma wasn’t very fun. It did not make you feel better about mankind. Instead, it reminded you of the ugliness of human existence.

And so, when you get to baggage claim, there is a good chance that you will put on your headphones, and that you will put your face in your phone, and that you will do everything you can to make sure that you do not come into contact with any more bearded chlorine salesmen from Tacoma.

You will not do this because you are a monster. You will do this because you are human, and humans do not enjoy discomfort. And this will work, for a time.

It will not, though, work forever. There will be another flight. There will be another window seat. There will be another bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma.

There will be another Paris.

But there will also be another Beirut.

And it would probably be a good idea if we got up and talked to her.

Of course, that would mean telling the bearded chlorine salesman from Tacoma that we need to go the bathroom. And that would mean putting our butts in his face, our backs in the tray table, our dignity on the floor.

So maybe the better thing to do would be to rethink the way we fly, to give ourselves a chance to learn from the other people on the plane.

And not just the ones who are sitting three inches away from us.