Susan Sontag

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breath-taking provincialism. It universalized the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment–that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of ''the modern,'' and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millons of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing it.