Monday, July 18, 2005
Doubts about cameraphone journalism - journalism.co.za - the resource for journalists
Doubts about cameraphone journalism - journalism.co.za - the resource for journalists: "Hmmm ... Can I be alone in having mixed feelings about all this? I think it was Heidegger who said that 'technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it'.
I find it astonishing - not to say macabre - that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.
Especially when one realises what was in this 'amateur' material. Some of the cameraphone video clips sent to ITV News, for example, were so graphic as to be 'unusable', according to the channel's editor. I haven't seen the clips, so can only imagine what they contained.
But I can guess: images of human beings blown to pieces, missing limbs, intestines, perhaps even heads - sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters whose privacy has been invaded in the most intrusive way, even as they lay dying.
I suppose there will be arguments about how this imagery and footage is justified because it conveys so vividly the horrors of which terrorists are capable. But I don't buy it, and I don't think broadcasting organisations should either.
Such arguments are merely a retrospective attempt to dignify the kind of ghoulish voyeurism that is enabled by modern communications technology.
In his memoirs, Graham Greene recalls how, while confined to hospital as a young man, a boy in the bed next to him died suddenly. He recounts how, while sympathising with the child's parents, he found himself also observing their frantic grief, and concluded that in every novelist's heart there must be 'a sliver of ice'.
But at least Greene was a great artist who was able to put that sliver to creative use. The same cannot be said for those enthusiastic cameraphone ghouls on 7 July. Technology offered them a way of not attending to the pain of others. Picture-messaging to broadcasters offered them the chance of 15 minutes of fame. But if I had to decide between the girl who chose to stay and help the victims and the fiends who vied to take their pictures, then I have no doubt as to where true humanity lies.
And how long will it be, I wonder, before the mobile networks start using 7/7 as yet another argument for upgrading to a 3G cameraphone?"
I find it astonishing - not to say macabre - that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.
Especially when one realises what was in this 'amateur' material. Some of the cameraphone video clips sent to ITV News, for example, were so graphic as to be 'unusable', according to the channel's editor. I haven't seen the clips, so can only imagine what they contained.
But I can guess: images of human beings blown to pieces, missing limbs, intestines, perhaps even heads - sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters whose privacy has been invaded in the most intrusive way, even as they lay dying.
I suppose there will be arguments about how this imagery and footage is justified because it conveys so vividly the horrors of which terrorists are capable. But I don't buy it, and I don't think broadcasting organisations should either.
Such arguments are merely a retrospective attempt to dignify the kind of ghoulish voyeurism that is enabled by modern communications technology.
In his memoirs, Graham Greene recalls how, while confined to hospital as a young man, a boy in the bed next to him died suddenly. He recounts how, while sympathising with the child's parents, he found himself also observing their frantic grief, and concluded that in every novelist's heart there must be 'a sliver of ice'.
But at least Greene was a great artist who was able to put that sliver to creative use. The same cannot be said for those enthusiastic cameraphone ghouls on 7 July. Technology offered them a way of not attending to the pain of others. Picture-messaging to broadcasters offered them the chance of 15 minutes of fame. But if I had to decide between the girl who chose to stay and help the victims and the fiends who vied to take their pictures, then I have no doubt as to where true humanity lies.
And how long will it be, I wonder, before the mobile networks start using 7/7 as yet another argument for upgrading to a 3G cameraphone?"
