George Floyd: A Martyr of the Digital Age
George Floyd was/is a martyr, and he died a martyr’s death. To accept him as such — as an essential social icon who died for a necessary cause, whether or not he was directly aware of it, or not — is to understand his death in the context of the digital age and its relationship to racial-inequity awareness in America. Digital connectivity, speed, visualization and information are all essential to how the world relates to George Floyd’s death.
The intimacy and immediacy of the visual and audible information that the videos of Floyd’s death provided, and the connectivity of the shared reactions to his death, are what made us feel as though we knew George Floyd. After all, we were digitally present in his most vulnerable moment — his torture and death.
It was not necessarily who George Floyd was as an individual before May 25th, 2020 but what he came to represent in a 9-minute video that made him immortal. In those moments, Floyd transformed from an average person into a hero that changed the entire world.
Joseph Campbell, in “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” argues that often heroes are not originally aware of their mission and that it is exposed to them at some point on their journey. And, George Floyd seemed…
