The Hydra-headed Crisis

We are living at a time of successive crises – the Haiti earthquake, famine in East Africa, the Taliban attack on Kabul, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Boxing Day Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina...No sooner does one crisis disappear from the headlines, than another pops up in a different part of the world. Perhaps this is just because we are more aware of crises in faraway places than in the past. The explosion in information and communications technologies has allowed us to receive and indeed experience images and texts not only from the media but from friends and families and indeed anyone with a camera or a mobile and access to the Internet, and, at the same time, to be able to blog, twitter and comment upon what appears to be instant reportage from whatever crisis zone dominates airwaves at that particular moment.