"Mining incidents" — at least the ones accompanied by media swarms — tend to come in  four-year cycles for some reason.  In '02 it was Quecreek, in '06 it was Sago, and now the world watches, riveted, at Copiapó.  (We even got a little of Housewives of Copiapó thrown in for good measure.)



The immediate outcome at Copiapó is triumph, with book and movie deals in the works, and the flash of fame and brief fortune to follow.  But that part won't last, and may, in fact, make the miners' inevitable return to the mines the real tragedy of this tale. (Or not: when one of the miners was told he had a future in television, he told his fans “the only thing I’ll ask of you is that you don’t treat me as an artist or a journalist, but as a miner. I was born a miner and I’ll die a miner.”).

That the miners have been celebrated as heroes for what amounts to sitting tight and being fed through a tube (Terry Schiavo anyone?) provides us with probably the most potent of the many metaphors we have to choose from.  Things look kinda dire these days, but if we just sit tight — hey, who do I have to call to get my effin feeding tube?  I'm starvin' here!

There's been a lot made of the role of religious faith in getting the 33 through their ordeal (much has been said about the miners' request for cigarettes, a crucifix and Elvis, though I suspect it was not late, fat, gospel Elvis), and it isn't surprising in the least that many fell to their knees and thanked God when they reached the surface again.  I did the same when Lost finally ended earlier this year.

Of course the Chilean Miners were never really lost, were they? Or they were lost in plain sight, you could say.  As with the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf, we could see it all unfold in real time over the course of weeks and months, but could do nothing about it.  Talk about a handy metaphor.  Maybe that's the deal with the Hebrew God.  He's watching this all from a bad dial-up connection. 

The truth is, the incident in Copiapó was a real reality show, what with the presence of modern communication and cameras to broadcast the trials and travails live from deep down in the mine itself.  We simulate this kind of situation in television dramas like Lost and staged reality shows like Big Brother (in fact, if what we got on the surface here was Real Housewives, what we got down below was Big Brother: Copiapó).  And now, since it was really real, we can turn it into a fictionalized based-on-reality TV movie.

Of course, the distinction is becoming more or less moot, especially with a younger generation who experience lived reality through media.  This is a huge leap, actually.  We used to come home from our actual lives and watch a bit of TV in the evening.  And sociologists freaked out about that?  Now people literally can't be without the devices through which they filter reality in real time.  Take away their smart phone and they're suddenly struck dumb.   

We live today in Bentham's Panopticon — a blueprint for prisons, originally.  But whereas Foucault focused on the impact of the "unequal gaze" — it doesn't seem to bother us so much.  We seem to relish the idea of being watched at least as much as we enjoy watching cats on youtube (or others of our own species engaged in all manner of jackassery).  In fact, "going viral" is the highest compliment a content provider on the web can be paid (and lord knows you won't get paid any other way for posting shit on youtube).

Which leads me to wonder.  Copiapó was a good old-media style human interest story with a new media twist, but was it really bigger than "keyboard cat"?

I think we all know the answer to that.