Lately, I have been receiving emails with attachments from friends. Or emails with weblinks to pages only to be entered with a password. They bear headlines like “Sandra is here!” or “More about Enya”, sent to a rather vast number of email addresses round the planet. It is proud parents talking of their newborns, their nights without sleep, endless bliss when the baby smiles, mixed with feelings of anxiety and hope. Most times, the pictures that are sent alongside those emails show the baby on its own, wrapped in warm blankets of all different colours, eyes tightly closed, fists just about sticking out from under the cover.
Thinking about the idea of ritual and the media naturalising themselves within society as the bearer of breaking news, it sometimes seems to me as though the senders of these emails and especially the images attached to them suggest a certain readyness within the recipient.
However, there also is a certain rupture in the middle of life, almost such as the “we interrupt this broadcast to bring you the breaking news…” The immediacy of the message sent out, the sudden closeness between the sender and the recipient is almost frightening, yet so unthinkably frightening that joy is the way to feel when looking at the infant snuggling into its covers. Yet, the closeness remains virtual as the baby might grow up hundreds of kilometres away from where the recipient resides. Life still goes on without the event of actually being close. Until the next “breaking news” arrive.
.meandomedar 
