I think the MAIN reason we talk so freely about Corby and are so silent about Wood is that we can identify with Corby but can't identify with Wood.
Most, if not all, of us have travelled overseas and been through our own and another country's airport/sea port admission procedures. We've all stood in the queue at Customs and had questions asked/baggage searched (to a greater or lesser extent), and we've all felt vunerable - no, I didn't let that bag out of my sight, I'm sure I didn't - but when I went to the toilet/get that coffee, maybe....
How many of us are Engineers? How many of us have lived in a place with road blocks, heavily fortified and gated areas, car bombs, random acts of violence?
I think that probably because we can't immediately and readily identify with Wood, we have a bit of a problem empathising with his plight, and are therefore silent. However we can immediately and readily identify with Corby at the airport, in the queue at Customs, in a foreign country....
Additionally I think we don't want to think about the worst-case outcome for Wood - beheaded on video and presented for all the world to see on the internet. I don't think any of us really believes that the worst-case outcome for Corby will be the death sentence. However we can identify with the scenario of life, or long term, imprisonment in a jail cell that we have seen on TV more than a few times.
If we can identify and empathise with Corby, we find it easy to engage in debate about her. However because we can't readily identify and therefore empathise with Wood we keep our cognative (thinking) and emotional (empathetic) distance, and we rationalize. "He was there for the money. If you go there you've got to expect that kind of thiing". We distance ourselves cognatively and emotionally from his plight and therefore don't readily involve ourselves in debate about his plight.
I'm not being critical of our behaviour - there's nothing wrong with it - it's an automatic defence mechanism to protect us from thinking about an outcome/scenario that we just don't want to think about. This is just us being human.....
