I still have Delia's book, Memecracia, about the viral trends that govern us, pending at the top of my reading pile. The day before yesterday, without planning it, we ended up being a small part of one of those news stories that media outlets from all over the world publish to get a half smile from their viewers amidst so much daily drama. Those news stories that are candy for children, that little piece of chocolate after eating.
Two nights ago, Mauro Pallota decided to make a graffiti on an orange wall in Rome. The drawing characterized Pope Francis as a superman from the 80s, pulling his briefcase full of values and a scarf from his football team. The Vatican had "approved" the work with pleasure hours before through a tweet that at that moment already had more than 1000 RTs. And you know, when "Twitter burns", there is news.
The next morning, we happened to pass by and when we approached to see it, the photographers from the large international agencies were just arriving to cover the news (AP, Reuters, AFP). I asked Blanca to take a picture of me jumping, it would look good on Instagram. I always liked jumping in photos, someone even dedicated a Flickr group to me. I knew it was exactly what the colleagues needed, a bit of expressive reaction from the people to the painting. So we ended up there, both of us as spontaneous models doing little jumps in front of those cameras that were the eyes of the world.
Hours later we started appearing on the websites of dozens of newspapers like The USA Today, Clarín, The Huffintong Post, La Voz de Galicia, Reuters, The Indian Express, Australian television... even a mini interview on the Polish news that noon.
Thanks to David Rodríguez for sending me the image of this newspaper from Melbourne, Australia.
We live in a world where news flies more than ever. Millions of media outlets catch the same focus, mutate the virus, and amplify the signal, or the noise, for the rest of humanity. In this case it was a quite harmless thing. But maybe we also need more ideas on how to slow down the news, to contextualize it better, to put it in quarantine, to have fewer impacts and more reflection.
If you intended to take a photo with superpope the next time you came to Rome, I am afraid the city council already erased the graffiti yesterday. It seems these Romans do not have as much vision as our countrymen from Borja.