But has the ubiquity of images undermined our ability to do what’s right simply on the basis of what we know? Are we increasingly paralyzed without the sensory stimuli of cracking gunshots, glinting blades and horrified screams? Video and still pictures reveal the lives of others to us, giving a face to suffering and to valor.
And the power of imagery to spark empathy, and of empathy to spark action is indisputable. Their actions aren’t crimes of passion against their prey their passion is for and about themselves.Īre we increasingly paralyzed without the sensory stimuli of cracking gunshots, glinting blades, and horrified screams?īut our need to validate ourselves and our experiences predates YouTube or Facebook or even the Internet. For all of these murderers, the grievance trumps the victims (who are almost irrelevant and interchangeable to them), and the grievance itself is meaningless unless publicized. YouTube - that digital landfill of profound moments and ephemera that staggeringly vast repository of laughing babies, funny cats, old commercials, bootleg concert footage, wedding dances, great moments in sports, bedroom concerts, and, until they’re removed, of snuff films - invites us all to “Broadcast Yourself.” And we do we now all expect to be seen and heard. Like the ISIS terrorists who ensure that their filmed beheadings have good production values like Charleston’s Dylann Roof, who posed with his weapons and blogged about his rationale, Flanagan also used a video camera so that he could capture and post the evidence of his crime to social media. Vester Lee Flanagan held off on firing his legally obtained weapon until he knew the light on the television camera had turned to green and his victims were on air. In the aftermath of the live broadcast shootings of two WDBJ journalists and the woman they were interviewing, Sontag’s words are painfully resonant. “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” Susan Sontag wrote in " On Photography" in 1977, well before social media existed. (YouTube) This article is more than 6 years old.
Moments later, suspect Vester Flanagan fatally shot Parker, and the man behind the camera, Adam Ward. As we agonize over whether to watch the video of the WDBJ shootings, are we asking ourselves the wrong question? In this screengrab, reporter Alison Parker conducts a live on-air interview with Vicki Gardner on Aug.
0 kommentar(er)
