Tim Black points out the most common media memes about the Costa Concordia have much more to do with snobbery and disdain than with human interest or concern about the actual causes of the shipwreck:
The sequence of events that led to the sinking of the luxury cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, is now pretty much established. But facts have not got in the way of a variety of commentators who are using the accident to parade their prejudices about too-big ships and ignorant passengers.
[. . .]
These are the tragic facts so far. What no one knows exactly is why it happened. Explanations have been mooted, of course: a power blackout affecting the ship’s steering; inaccurate navigation charts failing to show the rocks; or human error, in particular by the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino. Yet while the exact reason for the ship straying off course remains unclear, that has not stopped another object of blame coming to the fore in some of the coverage. That is, the real, underlying reason for the Costa Concordia accident is to be sought not in the actual events of Friday evening but rather in the profit-driven, build-‘em-high cruise industry and, by association, in the sea-faring ignorance of all those who sailed aboard her.
This is why so much of the coverage seems obsessed with the size of the Costa Concordia. Over the past few days, we have been repeatedly told that cruise ships have doubled in size over the past decade. While this is true — and as the twenty-sixth-largest liner in the world, the Costa Concordia is far from the most impressive of this new breed of ships — the Concordia’s size does not actually tell us why it was three miles off course. Nor does it explain why the ship’s crew was unaware of the rock outcrop despite having navigation equipment. Yes, perhaps ship size does affect manoeuvrability, but would a smaller vessel not have suffered a similar fate that befell the Concordia? In fact, the obsession with the ship’s size sheds very little light on what happened to the Concordia on Friday evening.
What the convenient obsession with size draws upon, rather, is an antipathy towards the cruise industry, a sense that it is little more than the ocean-going equivalent of that other right-thinking person’s bête noire, Dubai. In other words, a vulgar testament to profit and sky-high consumption. So although size here is not really relevant as a cause of the Concordia’s capsizing, it appears relevant to certain commentators as a symbol of commercial hubris, of complacent materialism.
