Overuse of cameras just another modern day menace

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If a wild man with blood on his hands and a knife and machete in his fist came up to you and asked you to film him on your camera phone, you’d imagine your first instinct would be to turn on your heels and run as fast and as far as you could in the opposite direction.

But apparently you’d be wrong.

Because such is our insatiable appetite to capture all moments and images that we’d risk our own lives to film the bloody end of someone else’s.

The most bizarre thing about that horrific murder in Woolwich recently wasn’t that two lunatics attacked and killed an unsuspecting, off-duty soldier – it was that dozens of people filmed the aftermath with no more fear than they would have had if they’d come across a car that had run over a cat.

They were circling around like a lingering audience after coming out of a theatre, instead of a group that had witnessed what was, by any stretch, a deadly drama.

Some very courageous citizens among them stood over the murder victim’s body in open defiance of his killers, and they deserve every commendation the British can muster for their bravery.

But those who mooched around with their mobile phones have clearly watched too much television and must have felt like they’d been given a walk-on part in a new series called CSI: London.

The image of a man ranting into a camera phone about Muslims and war, with his beheaded victim clearly visible on the street behind him isn’t just deeply disturbing – it is a final commentary on where we find ourselves in this age of technology and instant news.

But then again, should we really be surprised that people will unwittingly risk their own lives so they’ll have something to show their friends later – or something to flog to television or the tabloids of thirty pieces of silver.

More and more, American television relies on what is euphemistically called ‘citizen journalism’ – which is where individuals with cameras or video recorders roam the streets in search of a crime, a crash or a dead body.

From a positive point of view, were it not for ‘citizen journalism’, we’d have known little of the Arab Spring or Syrian uprising; the civil resistance in Bahrain would never have been heard of outside of the Persian Gulf.

Indeed there are agencies – our own Mark Little’s Storyful, for example – which have been set up for the specific purpose of distilling such footage and verifying its provenance, to bring it to a worldwide audience.

And all of that is very positive – a chance for ordinary people to play their part outside of ‘traditional media’ who either couldn’t be there in time to capture a moment or who, in the case of some US networks, may prefer to ignore it.

But it’s when this becomes little more than voyeurism that the waters turn considerably more muddy.

And you’d have to wrack your brains to imagine a scenario, anytime, anywhere, that there isn’t some galoot with a camera recording it for posterity.

You only have to see a performing puppy standing on its hind legs and half a dozen people have their phones out to take a picture, never thinking for a second that even they themselves wouldn’t want to look at the image at any point over the rest of their lives, let alone show it to their guests at a future dinner party.

If you’re unlucky enough to be seated towards the back of a concert, you’ll spend more of the night watching the band through someone else’s camera or mobile because where once it was a sea of cigarette lighters illuminating the arena, it’s now a wall of phones lighting up the night.

At the end of the day, is the world really a better place because we’ve filmed every minute of every day?

And anyway, if we keep recording it all of the time…..when will we have time to actually watch it?

 For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.