|
|
|
|
If you logged on to your computer yesterday, you may have received an email
that looked, at first, like spam. Forwarded many times and with crazy
punctuation, it may have carried a preliminary message along the lines of
"please help us!!!!!!!", before scrolling down to the original email:
a sober address from Phil McCann, uncle of Madeleine, the missing
four-year-old, asking for your assistance.
Madeleine McCann has been missing for over two weeks and responding to her
plight doesn't rely on being able to do anything about it. But if you went
online yesterday, seeking an outlet for your sympathy, you would have been
confronted by a confusing and in some quarters horrifying array of options. The
dozens of sites and subsites that have sprung up in the last fortnight -
findmaddie.com, help_find_madeleine_mccann.com, givemaddieback.com,
hopeformaddy.com and the misspelt findmadeline.com - were of such breadth and
randomness that by yesterday morning, the appeal set up by the McCann family,
ww.bringmadeleinehome.com, was forced to identify itself as The Official
Website To Find Madeleine McCann. It is noticeable that, bar in the context of
an abbreviated text message, nowhere on the site is she referred to as
"Maddie".
In these days of mass media sophistication, no one needs it explaining to them
that where a child who gets kidnapped is news, a pretty child who gets
kidnapped is headline news and a pretty child who gets kidnapped and whose
parents save lives for a living and go to church is rolling news. Even so, in
the days since she disappeared, the Madeleine campaign has, for scale of
involvement, outdone anything we've seen before. There are 90 different
Madeleine-related groups on Facebook alone, circulating her photo to user
communities of between six and 76,000 members. The official website has
registered 60m hits and posters of her have been seen in campsites as far away
as Bulgaria,
translated into local languages via appeals put out by bloggers. At least four
premiership football stars have made TV appeals and there is reward money on
offer totalling some £2.5m.
It was the point at which big business started to get involved, however - BAA,
the British airports operator, is carrying the "help find Madeleine"
message on its website - and yellow ribbons began appearing on all benches in
the House of Commons, that people started to feel a little uneasy. While the
BBC flew out Huw Edwards to look apocalyptic, live from Praia Da Luz, people
started to ask how much of this was actually helping, and why people were doing
it.
Partly, it is a function of resources: when Holly and Jessica, Sarah Payne and
James Bulger disappeared, there weren't the online communities available to
power this kind of grassroots response, and for that response to have a
knock-on effect in loftier quarters. But that doesn't quite explain the tone of
the outpourings. Some MPs privately voiced concerns about the bandwagon aspect
of wearing yellow ribbons last week, but more offensive were the homemade video
tributes to Madeleine, posted on YouTube to soundtracks by Christina Aguilera
and N Sync, and indistinguishable in tone and relish from the regular pop-star
fan tributes.
There have been mutterings that this is a post-Diana thing. But much of the
response seemed to have more to do with the News of the World's erstwhile anti-paedophile
campaign, and the general hysteria that governs "right" versus
"wrong" parenting. On the parenting websites, so riven along
sectarian lines, here at least was something everyone could get solidly behind.
No wonder the stampede to share the McCanns' pain has been so thunderous -
although before the family's impeccable credentials became clear, one imagines
there was a conflict in some tabloid newsrooms over Parents who left their kids
alone while they had dinner, versus Evil Paedophile Under the Bed, he's coming
for your kids next.
The most unsettling aspect of the case has been the juxtaposition of hysterical
language with huge pictures of the child, redolent of the Onion's spoof front
page after 9/11 - "holy ****ing shit!" read the headline, across the
blazing towers - which satirised the undisguised relish of much of the
coverage.
Of course, at root, people only want to help. But their exaggerated responses
look from some angles like self-gratification. "Help us," wrote one
group of people who had never met the McCanns, to another group equally remote
from them. "Missing for two weeks now please forward to anyone abroad -
she may be as far away as Bolivia
or Colombia or the USA,"
wrote someone else, hyperbolically, and lots of people pondered and responded
to the indefensible posting "imagine what she's feeling?" And
everywhere reproduced the picture of Madeleine's unusual right eye, in
close-up, presented as a helpful distinguishing mark.
This is not how it came across, however. At this stage, we are so absurdly far
removed from the point of the exercise that it is is only a matter of time
before someone superimposes a big cartoon tear beneath it and, appealing for
further help in a world that doesn't exist, posts it on Second Life. |
|
 |
|
