The Trouble With Video

TheTroubleWithVideo isn't VideoAddiction or the FeedbackEffect or any such guff. The trouble with it is that it puts ideas and persons into your head without engaging your critical faculties. This means that a video of one innocent being beheaded far outweighs the reality of 10,000 innocents murdered by bombs, off camera.

Actually "in camera" used to mean in private; those 10,000 were technically murdered in camera. But I take your point.

This is why the media owners have become so hideously powerful today. To paraphrase Nixon, they have the public by the eyeballs - its hearts and minds must follow.

http://www.innermind.com/outerlimits/sounds/oolsnds/o_voice.wav

Um, yeah, do not adjust your mindset ...

This isn't something limited to video, though the effect may be more pronounced there. Still shots have the same power. Even painted pictures did before video was invented; that's the reason artists used to be state-sponsored and art state-commissioned. We define our realities in words and images, and our realities are meant to communicate; without that communication we couldn't understand each other even as well as we do.

Is this about the Nick Berg video? I just watched it after initially thinking I wouldn't; there are too many messages in the media about it for me to not go back to the source. If you're wondering about it it's quite disturbing but less graphic than your average hollywood splatter flick. And much less than "Doom". The difference is you know it actually happened, so it links all those backyard-geek and big-box-office fantasies of violence with the messy death of joe-blow-down-the-street.

Apparently, the video's final scene (the only really graphic part) has furnished a still shot (of the victim's severed head) which has been published with little warning. I don't think any such image is suitable for viewing by young children. In contrast, various photos of humiliated (naked) Iraqi prisoners seem not to have been released uncensored to the public at all.

And this snuff stuff isn't new; the Vietnam moratorium videos of the summary execution, the napalmed child running naked, and the buddhist monk's self-immolation are far worse again. It's the political charge of this video, rather than its actual content, that is so troublesome.

I concur. What's disturbing about that napalmed child is that if you show the image to Americans, they'll tell you the North Vietnamese were responsible for it.

Responsible in what way? That the NVA actually dropped the napalm; or the "we had to destroy Vietnam to save it" line of reasoning that one occasionally hears from the loony right-wing?
One good thing about Vietnam, is that it shows that despite what is happening today in Iraq, there is hope for the future. During the VietnamWar, both the US/South Vietnamese and the VietCong?/NVA engaged in numerous and often unspeakable atrocities against each other (and against the citizenry). The US used napalm and other such weapons indiscriminately; the NVA ran the infamous HanoiHilton?; and both sides were prone to destroying whole villages considered "unfriendly". Fast forward 30 years past the end of the war. The two governments have normalized relations, and outside of the occasional extremist or bigot, there is little if any animosity between the American and Vietnamese people. Many Vietnamese live here, many Americans nowadays travel there (and have nothing to fear but the occasional pickpocket). May the US and Iraq, a generation hence, be in a similar situation.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as Stalin once said.