Contextual Analysis German Plane Crash

The crash that shook the Alps and then traveled the world all in a matter of hours.
How did one plane crash have such a huge affect on the entire world. The obvious answers: The people on the plane were diverse enough that there were many countries represented in the crash and each country had to have a piece of the news. The world revolves around tragedy as much as we do comedy and this was something important to look at.

Maybe an answer that isn't so obvious though is that after further investigation into the crash there was evidence that the co-pilot locked the cabin door and forced the plane into the crash. Or the news that came out afterward that the co-pilot may have been on anti-depressant drugs or maybe he wasn't fit to fly that day. Either way whether we are looking for the outrageous answers or the commonplace answers we see how fast news travels today. The biggest perpetuator of news today is social media, and it has a huge impact on how the news is viewed.

Type in the search terms german plane and the results are astounding.

Physical Context

This plane crash happened in the Alps in France. The remote location made it very difficult for rescue and investigative teams to get the crash site. This photo shows the airport where the plane was due to land.

Psychological Context

This context had a huge part in the media coverage of the crash. There were reports of depression, illness and suicide in a lot of the articles I was able to find. These impact the psychological context because they make us as readers question whether or not he should have been flying the plane at all, and whether or not this could have been prevented. People started to speculate on whether or not the co-pilot was fit to fly that day. The terror that followed also led many people to wonder about their own pilot or if the standard for deciding if the pilot should be flying that day was too low.

The news was full of different countries and people wondering why they had not seen the crash coming. Many people would have saw the reports that there had been depression and wondered why the airline didn't see it too.
The Lufthansa CEO countered by saying that their pilot selection procedures were not "touched by this single tragedy" and this was not something that was normal for the airline or the pilots who had been hired by the airline.

Social Context

When the news of the crash hit social media it seemed like the whole world thought they had to do or say something about it. The FBI was involved because there were three Americans reported to be on the plane when it crashed. Americans were a minority on the plane crash, but since we feel like we are an important country in the world the rest of the world needs our help to determine why this terrible crash occurred. I understand that we are a social people and that communication is important to us, but in this situation I think we need to take a step back. This was such a terrible tragedy and unless we were affected personally by it I don't think we need to stick our noses into it too deep.

Cultural Context

The people involved in the crash didn't have a chance to tell their stories or say goodbye to loved ones. The descent from the time the pilot was locked out to the time the plane went down was eight minutes. We may never get to know the stories of all of the people on the plane, but they still have a story. The American culture is to know everything about everyone and as the reports kept coming in about people on the plane we wanted to know about the details of everyones lives.

Huffington Post article describing the passengers in the crash.

Airbus issued a statement over Twitter directing this to the families of the crash victims.

Temporal Context
This happened on March 24, 2015 and a few days after the crash every social media site was buzzing about it. It was appearing on the home screen of Yahoo news and all the major news outlets around the country, and even People magazine got in on the reporting. Then something new happened in the world that was tragic and it seemed to get pushed to the background.

The timeliness of the crash made it appear in the forefront of our minds. As long as people were talking about it news channels continued to report on it.

I posted this to my blog about a week after it occurred and the news had started to die down, but when I went and looked up some of the articles so I could create hyperlinks I realized that there was news concerning this crash as recent as two days ago. It will take a long time for this crash to fully work its way out of the media limelight.

My Thoughts

I didn't know much about this crash before I started doing this project, and I didn't realize the scope that social media covers. It travels around the world almost as soon as it is happening. In some ways this is a good thing. We are able to find out what happened with the three Americans that were on the plane, and their families were able to get closure from not wondering what had happened, and they were also able to get support from people who didn't know them personally but felt like they could do something to help.
Media also made this crash worse than it already was. This was already a terrible accident that shook different countries around the world, and then when we continued to look into it it became even worse. We didn't know about the depression and the drugs before social media caught wind of those things. We only knew that the co-pilot had apparently decided to commit suicide and take everyone on the plane down with him. After learning that he had a history of depression and possibly needing to take anti-depressants the accident turned into "what if it wasn't an accident?" People started to question whether or not it was an act of terrorism or if there were more sinister plots behind it.
Social media can do many things, and with this crash we see that it can turn an accident into something much worse if we let it go too far.

Social Media and Climate Change

We were asked whether or not social media impacts what people think about climate change and whether or not it is a barrier or something to help people understand it better. My half of the classroom was asked to find the helpful side and there are a lot of different social media sites that have all of that information on them. I believe it is helpful because you can find anything about climate change that you want. If we want information it is available, all we have to do is look.

Climate change is happening whether or not we can see it here in Utah, or if senators in Washington still see snowballs. We can find all of the information regarding how the world has changed in the past 50-100 years, and that kind of evidence is indisputable. We cannot see it happening, but if we use social media to our advantage we can see how much climate change is happening and how we are being swayed by social media to believe one way or another.

Learning 2.0

What would I change about the public education system?

I am honestly not sure what I would change. I was a 4.0 student growing up and I always did well in school and never really struggled with any of the assignments or classes that I took. I don't know if the school I went to was really easy or if I really am that smart, but if I had to change one thing it would be having to take specific classes for specific things.

I realize that doctors need to take certain classes for medical school in order for them to perform their duty as a doctor and be well informed on the procedures and tasks that have to be done, but what if a communication student wants to take an anatomy class also? Can't that count for something? I think that the higher education system should require students to take a certain amount of upper division, lower division and elective credits in order to graduate. There should be a degree in "College Education." At the end of this course students would look back on the classes that they took and experimented with and decide which classes had the most benefit to them, and be able to use those classes to earn a degree that they will be able to proudly state that they graduated from college and took classes that are useful to them and not pointless classes that they will never use again.

Taking a class on Media Law was not something I wanted to take, and I don't anticipate ever having to use that in the future. I believe that is what law school is for; for those people who wanted to study law and all the in's and out's and stuff you can and cannot say in the paper. They would benefit greatly from this class, but for me it was a waste of time, because I already don't remember anything I learned. Instead I remember the number of hours I spent worrying and wondering about passing this class that I didn't want to take in the first place.

Giving students the chance to take classes they want to take will allow them to invest more in their education and actually want to go to class and learn material.