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Death In the Browser Tab
theodp writes: "There you are watching another death on video," writes the NY Times' Teju Cole. "In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else's crisis, someone else's horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it." Cole continues, "For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions of death, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space." Disturbing as they may be (Cole notes he couldn't bear to watch the ISIS beheading videos), such images may ultimately change things for the better. Is it better to publish them than sweep them under the carpet?
I would apply the old open-source aphorism to this as well. It may take time for the wheels of justice to move in your favor, but at least there is still a reasonable expectation of movement in that area.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Don't want to see them and I will actively avoid them.
Anything that brings clicks and the mighty ad money. Fuck people.
Am I doing this right?
Other than the fact that they are both depicting the end of a human life, I don't think there's any comparison between airing beheadings done by terrorists and a US citizen being shot in the back by a police officer.
Airing the former on the world stage only aids the terrorists' cause, the latter allows us to see something we SHOULD see, which is how police in this country comport themselves when they think no one is looking.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
On the other hand, in pre-modern eras (as well, sadly, for much of the 3rd-4th-world today) death was everywhere.
Most people lived/worked on farms, where animals were killed more or less in front of you, for you to eat that night, or later. Every family lost children, with medieval death rates for 2 yr olds reaching 50%, mostly to drowning. The slightest injury could easily (and more or less quickly) be lethal through infection, while waves of typhus and other communicable diseases were almost a constant fear.
I think what the author meant to say is that our little niche of modernity when we were safe from most random environmental deaths, yet insulated and never actually confronted by death, may have ended.
-Styopa
Well... if the police stopped murdering people in cold blood as a routine part of their job, we wouldn't have much video to air would we? The fact that there are people that still defend what the police do baffles me.
The cops that put 137 rounds into the car of 2 unarmed men that they pulled over because their car supposedly backfired... just got acquitted. How the hell does that work? How many in the local naighborhood were in mortal danger because of their actions? It's insane that any of those officers still have their jobs.
I have a simple solution for all of this. The burden of proof should be changed. Anyone working in law enforcement that kills someone in the line of duty should be assumed guilty and should have to prove it was justified to avoid prison. Not the other way around. Then lets see how they feel about body cameras.
Viewing these incidents through you favorite gadget while sitting in your safe, comfortable environment almost completely insulates you from the grusome/violent realities of the situation. IMO, the visceral details of these acts are not being portrayed to the viewer when he/she consumes the information. Kinda like when you buy meat in the grocery store.
I disagree entirely.
We've been systematically exposed to murder, rape, fraud, theft, and every other crime imaginable since the day we were born. Tom and Jerry, Wile E Coyote, etc. used to "kill" each other with mallets, dynamite, whatever was to hand. Games have gone from pixels touching to realistic 3D representations of killing prostitutes while the in-game characters whine about how they got in their way, "bitch".
And yet STILL, roughly the same percentage of people ever commit those kinds of crimes. Still, in some countries, crime figures are going DOWN per person, not up.
My grandfather's generation witnessed wholesale murder and genocide the same as I do - they were sent to deal with it, unprepared and unaware, and many of them never returned from battle the same. The same could be said of their grandfathers. And the same could be said of the war in Iraq, the war on terror, Vietnam, whatever war you want to pick.
Death is a horrible, but inevitable, part of life. Witnessing death may allow you to cope with further death more easily, but it does not turn you into a murderer on its own. I'd hate to know that a kid who lead a sheltered life and never experienced violence throughout it is suddenly thrown into even a street mugging without knowledge of how that might go. It can destroy people - I've seen it happen.
Yet those who suffer the most gory of horror films, witness the worst of the Internet, actively plough through it and seek out something that others might find abhorrent? They are not automatically immune to the effects of such things happening in real life yet can cope with it much easier if it happens.
Children who have NEVER been exposed to swearing form their own. Swearing is as natural an outburst of suppressed frustration as crying. People who do not swear are, in my head, either a) lying or b) scare the absolute fucking shit out of me.
People who aren't exposed to rudeness cannot understand that it's possible, or how to deal with it, or why they should play the game that others - now demonstrably in front of them - have never.
People exposed to violence are no different. I grew up not in a ghetto with bullets whizzing past my head, but in a rough area of London. I grew up with fights in the playground, and outside it, as a natural part of childhood (for that area). I, however, am a well-adjusted adult. I work for schools (and, therefore, have not committed these kinds of things as an adult). I can sit through the goriest of movies (whether it's actually just gore, however, and boring as fuck, or the gore is just part of the otherwise-good movie is a bigger question to my entertainment of it). And I've seen violence.
The thing it does is allows you to deal with it. It does not numb you to it. And, to be honest, I'm probably one of those people who could quite easily be numb to it - I'm probably high up on the autism scale and, as my friends and family would agree, it's so obvious I don't need to go and be diagnosed as such. But, still, real-life violence is abhorrent and scary to me, even if "fake" violence in movies and games is - actually - quite humorous and blasé to myself.
Yet, when there's blood, and violence in real-life, it's me that ends up phoning for help, stepping in, acting with a clear head. Everyone else is too shocked to do anything about it in time and just wants to get away from it. A good survival tactic, maybe, but not the way to handle it.
As stated for everything from your parent's smoking (my mother smoked incessantly basically from her pregnancy with me to today), parent's drinking (my father worked in a brewery and used to be paid in beer tokens so we were never without alcohol), your friend's jumping off bridges, your video games depicting violence, your movies trivialising abhorrent crimes, etc. JUST BECAUSE YOU SEE IT DOES NOT MEAN YOU WILL DO IT.
You have to be seriously maladjusted for something you witness to cause you to perform that same, or similar, acts as an a
People see so many they aren't affected emotionally any more.
Roman Colosseum anyone?
I think the sheer amount of movie violence made me desensitised enough to foolishly watch a beheading video, which I walked away from wondering what gets into peoples heads, besides the obvious bullshit of religion.
The Scott video was just another day in the life of a significant portion of our population, that in its self is tragic.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
It goes back to medieval wood cuts. Torture and death have always been recorded.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Still, in some countries, crime figures are going DOWN per person, not up.
Actually, crime is going down in most countries. Reduced crime is correlated with rising literacy, and economic growth, but is most strongly correlated with banning leaded gasoline. There is little evidence that links crime rates to prevalence of violence on TV or in video games, although there is some evidence that video games reduce crime by keeping young men off the street during their prime crime years (age 15-24).
I have a book that's falling apart at the seams from the 1960s, called "our friend the satellite", about electronic communications that wonders the same thing as it shows a picture of a man dying live on TV.
Mostly random stuff.
Wanting to watch people die is perverse.
What is worse, watching a person being raped or watching a person being killed? Both wrong, both perverse.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It does not sweep horrid acts under the carpet; it encourages their production.
My main concern is that someone will see that as their ticket to fame and start making the videos for public distribution. This has happened already, all I needed to see was one film on goofball.com 15 years ago where a soldier's throat was cut on film in Chechnya. Their cause gets views and exposure, and that is not a Good Thing.
Yes, yes, freedom of the press, I support it, but the media are also supposed to exercise some amount of discretion. I don't watch death videos, and I'd rather that public media choose not to publish them.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
The public will never want to face human nature. Any little thing that is upsetting or challenging in any way is always a victim of prejudice and law. Look at the issue of rising seas right now. Many in congress are in denial or avoidance of the issue. any reminder that we send people into really nasty and savage death or injury will be glossed over one way or another if not flat out banned by law. A great example is in not allowing photographs of coffins being shipped back from the war. Our politicians seek to make war look better for our side than it is. If we see no coffins and no bodies and are not allowed to know the true expense of a conflict we are prone to supporting the military action. The truth may set us free but our government in no way wants us to be free.
I think TFA has a point. Why bury your head in the sand? Profiting off of such footage is in an ethical grey to dark-grey area, but on the other hand having the ability to see things that occur in the world is overall a good thing, instead of being sheltered by the media.
"Hearing 'White cop kills yet another unarmed black man' is enough."
Absolutely not. Cops have been killing unarmed black men for a long, long time. It is only now, when video is frequently available and the media has decided to pursue the matter, that we see a national awakening to the problem. It is hard for most Americans to imagine what it's like to be a young black man living under the control of a brutal police force. We all want to believe that the police are there to protect and serve. It is only when we can see the evil with our own eyes that it becomes real and becomes intolerable.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
By showing their propaganda videos, it means said publisher is condoning the acts displayed,
No it doesn't. The act of making such videos accessible to others, and approving of the actions within the video, are two entirely different, wholly separate things. You can make the video available without approving of the contents.
But by making it available you take some responsibility for the consequences of the reporting.
A bunch of reporters were kidnapped in the middle east around the Iraq conflict until it stopped being news and became less common. Then soldiers were kidnapped (IIRC in the lead-up to the Israel-Lebanon war) and the Press made a big deal about it, so they started kidnapping more soldiers. The Press shares some responsibility for the increase in soldier kidnappings. Not as much as the people who kidnapped the soldiers, but still some, because *without the press they would not have been kidnapped.*
The same thing is true for school shootings after Columbine.
And the same thing is true for 9/11. Right after the 1993 WTC car bombing, the news media began explaining of course the towers didn't come down *because they were designed to withstand the impact of an airplane.* Osama Bin Laden followed western news about his attacks; this suggested to him the idea of flying planes into the towers. Without media coverage and publicizing the fact that the towers were designed to withstand the impact of a plane, we probably would not have had hijacked planes flown into the twin towers.
News is important; coverage of important issues matters. But coverage of *single events*, when done without regard to the consequences, can cost a lot of lives.
"There is little evidence that links crime rates to prevalence of violence on TV or in video games, although there is some evidence that video games reduce crime by keeping young men off the street during their prime crime years (age 15-24)."
A corollary to this is that widespread pornography is responsible for the decline in the developed world's population because of the increasing numbers of young men who would rather watch it than do it.
I would say that I needed to see the people jumping off of the World Trade Center. I didn't especially want to, it did not cause me to have a spring in my step for the rest of my day (it was more of a "howling cold wind blowing through your soul" sort of thing) but in an instant it solidified some very important things in my mind.
First, like a bolt of lighting I felt the full weight of human suffering involved and I mused deeply about how depraved someone would have to be in order to inflict this atrocity.
About a minute or two later, I realized that the Patriot Act was coming (of course I didn't know at the time that it would be given such an Orwellian name), and this realization colored every single discussion I had about 9/11 from then on.
if it became a societal norm that you didn't surprise people with these things. That is you have to actively do something or maybe two things to view this. I have no problem with gore and death but now when I'm eating lunch.
How about a two click rule?
Need Mercedes parts ?
Crime is going down in just about _all_ western countries. The leaded gasoline correlation does not apply in recent years.
We were watching TV
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw1Dxo_YE24
Terrorists are looking for reaction. We can fairly assume that they are going to tune their actions toward public exposure in any case. If reporters did not choose to report on any terrorist actions, they would simply find the next best thing. Perhaps spending more time working terror at the local level or moving toward bigger and more harmful actions in an attempt to gain a response.
While on the one hand you may be exciting evil doers who's actions were taken to prompt this kind of notoriety, you may also be leaving the public blind to potentially dangerous situations they may not otherwise have gotten themselves into. Some may say that IS stopped kidnapping reporters because there has been less publicity about it, but it might also be said that fewer reporters are putting themselves in those situations.
once more into the breach
Empathy is important.
Oh, quite, but given that I've gotten stuck with comforting somebody who watched a classmate bleed to death because nobody was sufficiently desensitized to provide first aid, I'll go with the policy of mass desensitization, basic first aid training for all, and free-to-at-cost first responder training for anybody who wants it.
Empathy may be important, but it needs to be properly calibrated so you can do something useful to help instead of freezing up, unable to render aid--which may include the proper application of violence. Some problems really are best solved that way. If you've got somebody running around stabbing people, for example, the problem will become remarkably simpler by, say, proper application of a brick to their head.
It's only been recent generations that haven't seen death up-close-and-personal. Used to be you had relatives and neighbors die premature deaths ALL THE TIME. If anyone things seeing these videos is "violating" it says more about how artificially and pathologically disconnected from death our society has become. Death is normal and all of us will die (if you believe Singularity will prevent that, you are an idiot and ignorant of both computer technology and human neuroscience - Singularity is just another religion/ideology by another name). Being familiar with it is immensely healthy. You are less likely to waste your time with frivolous things and appreciate the life you have by knowing it.
There's a fundamental difference...
ISIS wants to spread the videos to show how badass they are, and to plant fear into people. We shouldn't distribute it, because then we are doing what they want. You can easily report on this without spreading the actual footage.
A rogue cop killing an innocent wants to hide his crime, and should be exposed. This can also be easily reported on without showing footage, but the footage painfully shows how much the cops don't give a fuck about anybody's life.
So the first should never be shown, the second should be available. But really, it's not mandatory to show any death videos... Especially in this age of social media, I'm casually browsing facebook at work, and suddenly I see dead people coming by.... That isn't helping anybody...
And there we have the problem. Who gets to decide what is an important issue?
Single event vs. series of events might be a good first wave cut. Also, at least in the US and probably in many other places, journalism is one of the few professions that has ethical training and standards. What I'm suggesting is that when reporting on a single event, reporters and their publishers should be much more careful about the *consequences* of their reporting.
I'm not suggesting we have a board of censorship or anything like that.
Bin Laden was intent on committing an act of terrorism. Had he not hit the WTC, he would have hit something else. The root cause here was that Bin Laden was a terrorist.
No, you're focusing on one part of a much bigger picture and saying that it was the problem. "Root cause" is a phrase that doesn't mean very much. It's pretty ambiguous when you're dealing with a lot of moving pieces.
If the Afghani royal family had been better able to steer the economy of their country in a positive direction and less interested in hollywood decades ago... if the Taliban hadn't been so anti-western... if the soviets hadn't invaded Afghanistan... if the CIA hadn't armed the mujahadeen... if Osama hadn't been related to the Saudi Royals... if he hadn't developed the personal networks he developed... if only he had died in a car accident.... if, if, if... there are *a lot* of causes to complex problems.
Reporting can be one of those causal links, something that inspires some jackass like Osama to hit the twin towers or some stupid kid to shoot up his school. If I tell a large audience all the stupid things someone could do or did do, it's reasonable to think someone might actually do that. So I should be aware and careful about how I report on it.
Yes. It's a difficult balance, and one that I think journalists should be looking at more closely. Putting a moratorium on certain types of news might help, even a brief one--you know the rush to sensationalize. Or maybe when you have an event that kills more than ten people, you require a review of coverage by a specialist on the lookout for that kind of problem. Obviously not a government person, but a psychologist who can say "we should probably play this down a little so it doesn't provoke more terrorism."
Gonna go with a big fat bullshit.
The evildoers are the ones responsible, not those who report on it.
Negligence can cause death as easily as deliberate murder.