FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Brutal Lens of YouTube

In 1969, Eddie Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his shot of "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon." Later, he would lament the notoriety of the image and how it become synonymous with the atrocity and...

In 1969, Eddie Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his shot of “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon.” Later, he would lament the notoriety of the image and how it become synonymous with the atrocity and reality of the immoralities of the Vietnam War. It was a picture that called into question the place of the photographer in the war zone as well as the the intent in capturing such vivid and brutal moments. But the more frightening aspect of the photo may have been obvious: here was a moment, frozen in time, that reflected the truth behind human nature in times of conflict and how unforgiving violent we are.

Advertisement

Fast forward to now. The world can feel like a bleaker place than ever: tsunamis, riots, revolutions, and violence populate all the news media we consume, but instead of journalists providing (all of) the coverage, the individual citizen has now taken up that mantle. Every person on the street is now armed with a camera in their cellphone. No event evades capture. And just like Adam’s photograph, the bloodshed and barbarism that we witness, safe behind our laptops, is telling of the state of things.

The above video was posted earlier this month on the web, and it is hard to watch. But it is important. It is a 30 second snippet broadcast to all the billions of people who connect to the internet every day. If we here in America were unsure of the state of things in Bahrain and the rest of the Arab world, this is more than enough to paint a portrait of the turmoil happening there.

In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes that “he [General Nguyen Ngoc Loan] would not have carried out the summary execution there had [the press] not been able to witness it.”

We are now bearing witness to “journalism without borders” that knows no limits in its coverage and in its distribution: it sees more brutality than ever, and comes to us in easier and less filtered ways than ever before. These images can be hard to handle and painful to watch and we probably do not understand them fully, but in this era of a supposed “Social Media Revolution” they are worth our careful attention. Is this the new face of journalism? After that Vietnamese general, what does the YouTube phenomenon mean for the reality that it attempts to depict? What’s the impact on those of us who can glance at them at the click of a mouse? Stay tuned.