The Titan- Ethics of Humor

Referencing Instagram reels so coincidentally playing “Eyes blue, like the Atlantic now it’s going down like the Titanic” I acknowledge that though it’s difficult not to note the extreme irony of the implosion of the Titan underwater titanic exploration, how morally wrong is it for the majority of gen-z humour of the past 3 weeks to be at the expense of what could best be put as the lives of 5 avid (most notably, rich) explorers.

The Risk

Humans love thrill-seeking, and to me, dying while following your greatest passion seems a lot less tragic than dying through a car crash or through an unfortunate stroke of luck when the fates impulsively decide to cut your string of life. However, the Titan Submersible was the kind of risk that no one should have to take.

The Submersible was created by The company OceanGate to satisfy the fatal curiosity of those wishing to visit the iconic shipwreck of the once-sunk Titanic and its integrity to safety can most definitely be doubted attributing to the words of the CEO of OceanGate, who seems to be lax with the idea of life-altering risk. He claimed, “At some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything” and has described passenger safety acts as “needlessly prioritising passenger safety over commercial innovation”. One can hardly be assured of the safety of a vessel championed by him.

Furthermore, OceanGate claimed on its website as of 2023 that Titan was “designed and engineered by OceanGate Inc. in collaboration with experts from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington, yet both the University of Washington and Boeing confirmed that they had no involvement with the submersible. Therefore, even though all who were on the submersible were there of their own volition, the nature of the vehicle was being cloaked to them under misleading facts.

However, the miscommunication of vital information regarding lack of testing towards the riders of this vehicle is brushed underneath the rug in exchange for the shiny new idea of ridiculing the engineering controls of the ship, which quite literally consisted of a Logitech F710 wireless game controller. Though the action was quite ridicule worthy, does humour aid bring awareness to the exigency of this incident or divert the concentrated spotlight onto solely the comical outlook of this issue?

The Humor

Generation Z humour is often called Meta-Irony, A joke which can not be considered either sincere or ironic. For decades, humour has best been fueled by current events. During the 1960s, the peak humour in the United States would be a dig against communists. However today, amongst the concentrated amalgamation of content constantly flowing throughout all forms of social media, the “current” event changes almost every day. The lifespan of a joke has decreased from 3 months to 3 weeks to less than 8 days now, after which it becomes irrelevant. The question of the impacts of reducing the horrifying consequences of an event into humour can be split into two- The impact of the event being translated into humour-coded terms and how different the situation could be if the wave of meta-irony had not picked up this sediment of information.

The Impact of Meta-Irony

Imagine your best friend just passed away and you’ve mourned his loss, tried to reflect on memories and you need to recover, you go onto the internet to distract yourself but are instead drowning (no pun intended) in a flurry of posts about not your friend, but the submarine controller; not mourning his loss but ridiculing his death.

Eventually, when the current of media picks up an issue you’d assume it would pick up the names of those who started the company and hold them accountable. Rather, once the twiddling thumbs on screens across the world run out of ways to add humour into the death of your friend, the issue is buried below the landslide of the new incoming posts. The impacts of the event are not analysed, those responsible for the event were never brought into the red light, and so, the world moved on.

What ifs?

I admittedly, would not be aware of this issue at all if not for an Instagram post and neither would around 8 million people from all around the world. With the number of people keeping up with traditional forms of daily news at an all-time low, short-form media is most people’s first source of information. So, there is a large probability that this issue would have never hit the scale of awareness it did without social media. Ideally, one would hope that all eyes it hit would be those willing to sympathise with the victim and analyse the problem; yet even that is but an approximation since it could also catch the sight of those who skim the news with no real interest.

Where does this leave us?

The tentative answer to both these questions leads me to believe that the media solely informs. Social media, though it adopted the issue in a lax way with little to no emphasis on consequences, it effectively spread the issue and brought it to our eyes and ears to a scale that could not have been achieved solely by traditional media.

However, it is up to us to take it into our heads and hearts. By reading up more about the issue, we learn about the problem to ensure that previously made misdeeds do not repeat themselves. As well as increasing our awareness of its consequences; those it hurt and those who we could help and to primarily; ensure that despite the media and the public’s common coping mechanism (untimely jokes), we respect those hurt by this tragedy along with their families, friends and the real impacts that “The Titan” caused.

By Aditi Srivatsan