- America is increasingly a nation of exhibitionists, voyeurs and gossipmongers. Lost in our desire for mindless distraction is the collateral damage of a nation obsessed with other people’s business.
On Thursday, Americans found themselves ensnared by the latest groundbreaking news story. War in Ukraine? Floods in Texas? A public corruption scandal?
No. Two cheaters getting handsy at a Coldplay concert.
A video started circulating Thursday morning of a man with his arms wrapped around a woman on the Jumbotron at the concert. It appeared more than a friendly embrace. When they realized they were on screen, the woman covered her face and the man ducked under the camera’s line of sight. Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, declared the duo were either very shy or having an affair.
Internet sleuths went to work and uncovered the identity of the man, a CEO of a tech company, and the woman, his company’s head of HR. The exposed duo are married. Just not to each other.
More web detectives found the social media accounts of their actual spouses and began posting the video and comments on those accounts. It did not take long for mainstream news outlets to amplify the story with salacious headlines.
The nation was abuzz. As I watched the feeding frenzy unfold, I couldn’t help but to think we’ve become a nation of exhibitionists, voyeurs and gossipmongers.
Let’s start at exhibitionism. Assuming what we saw in the viral video was either the makings of an affair or an affair consummated, the public display marks a deviation from long held “social norm.”
Neither the man nor woman involved had any reasonable expectation of privacy at a public concert. There was a time when people creeping did everything in their power to hide it — false identities, seedy motels and the like. This was not that.
And while the pair assuredly did not want the attention of the Kiss Cam, other Americans are less ashamed. People film themselves fighting, fornicating and everything in between for the “thrill” that comes from exhibition these days — revealing their deepest, most intimate secrets, and the worst of their nature, for complete strangers.
And why do they do this? Because for every exhibitionist there are voyeurs — those who spend their time living vicariously through the juicy tidbits of other people’s lives. They scroll through hours of “Reels” and “TikTok” videos looking for the latest high. They follow celebrity trials. They forego their own opportunity to experience life.
It is a symbiotic, though toxic, relationship. Voyeurs feed exhibitionists’ desire for attention. Exhibitionists feed voyeurs’ need for cheap distraction from life.
And the gossipmongers? They pull others into the cycle, more often than not by assumption and embellishment. In this case, the assumption was that these two people were engaged in an active affair and what was on display was not just drunken (and thoroughly inappropriate) handsiness.
The other early assumption was that random people on the internet had correctly identified the players. While we now know that’s true, early on people just accepted it as true and began spreading. There certainly have been cases of false identification on the internet.
Lost in all of it is the damage to our social fabric and individual happiness.
As to the Coldplay couple. Everyone loves a good gotcha — a cheater’s comeuppance is particularly juicy. But the degree to which people revel in these things seems to ignore the significant collateral damage.
Spouses and children not only learned of a betrayal Thursday, but did so with the humiliation of the whole world watching, with complete strangers nonchalantly treating a deeply personal and painful moment as a form of entertainment…until the next shiny object passes by.
Defenders of the full court press point to the fact that this is the fault of the cheaters and they deserve what they get. That might be true, but it’s not about what the cheaters deserve. It’s about what their families didn’t.
Someone stepping out at a concert is not national news — thousands and thousands of people engage in infidelity every day. That they do has almost no discernible impact on your life. It’s the aforementioned voyeurism now promoted by professional news agencies desperate for clicks.
What happened also is not entertainment, at least not in any healthy sense. Americans are already moving away from the story. Our attention spans are short. But the hundreds of comments that poured onto spouses’ social media accounts, the headlines, they will linger in the psyches of the people closest to the event for years to come. Somewhere along the line we lost our humanity, our empathy and sense of grace in search of a dopamine hit.
Russ Latino
