Stick it to us

One night a few months ago, I was watching Global news and they had a piece that hit me hard; it consisted of was an EHS worker playing with dogs and asking for someone to adopt one. I have seen this type of piece a hundred different times, but for some reason this particular one made me take action and start volunteering.

Why now, considering I have been an animal lover my whole life, did these messages on my television get me moving? Two days before I saw the news segment, a friend of mine adopted a dog and directed me to the Humane Society's website so I could see what her new dog looked like. While browsing, I noticed the link "volunteer opportunities". I did not read it at the time; however, when I saw the news segment, the link on the website popped back into my head and that weekend I signed up to help.

Benjamin states the reproducibility of art can be revolutionary because it brings art and people closer together by creating tactile experience, or shock, on bodies thus leading to action (pg. 238). Baudrillard states reproducibility of art creates apathy, not action, in the masses because the media constantly throws massive amounts of accelerating information towards us, but because we are not capable of taking it all in, the information decellerates when it hits us, leading not to a tactile experience but to apathy and indifference; we feel we have no control over what we see. Although the views seem oppositional, I think both are correct; each just describes various points on the path to action or non-action. We cannot deny that shock exists, because we all felt it when watching the scene from the "L Word" in class, but we also cannot deny the apathy we all feel towards the events we see on TV everyday. I am interested in why certain shocks initiate action and others do not. I believe there is a space between shock and apathy where action can be initiated, but that space needs to be filled with recognizable resources if action is to be activated instead of apathy/inaction. Why did my tactile experience of sympathy, which I feel every time I see a news segment like the one mentioned above, stick around this time and cause action instead of my regular apathetic inaction? It stuck because I recognized I had the resources to do something about it; a website. I think both theories are correct because both can happen; reproducibility of art, here the repeated dog segment, can make me into Benjamin's active subject or Baudrillard's apathetic one. On the path of action versus inaction, there is a fork in the road after tactile experience; if I recognize that I can make a legitimate difference in a situation with the resources available to me, I will take the revolutionary path, but if I do not recognize such resources, my path will lead to apathy. The reproducibility of art will only be revolutionary if somehow the masses can internalize the knowledge that resources for change are always available, they just need to be discovered most of the time.