New blog, 4th September 2015
G’day again
There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.
Steven Spielberg
Obscene – Breasts
Not Obscene – Beheading (original too graphic for display)
I recently read a thoughtful post entitled, ‘When Social Media Goes Too Far’, and the author wrote: “At last count, the video depicting the tragic fatal shooting of a young news reporter in Virginia had garnered over 10 million views on social media. Despite warnings of its extremely graphic content- or perhaps because of that warning- as soon as the video was posted it went viral. Why is it that so many people were drawn to something so disturbing”.
She further commented on the ubiquitous phenomenon of ‘rubber-necking’, where people feel compelled to slow down long enough to look at the remnants of a car accident on the side of the road.
She makes the prescient point that the exploitation and shameless glamorisation of heinous behaviour, quickly made public and not challenged in any way, is a part of the tragedy.
She ends by saying: “As challenging or counter-intuitive as it might seem, we need to push back in protest, refusing to watch this kind of footage, protecting our children from viewing it, and refusing to support news stations and social media that attempt to exploit someone else’s tragedy while granting the perpetrator celebrity status”.
This post set me thinking. Often, when I feel disturbed or incensed by some particularly outrageous injustice portrayed in the media, I find myself feeling helpless in the face of this seemingly egregious and prurient obscenity. I am deeply troubled by the media’s ‘doing its job’ and by people who respond by reading or viewing such awful traumatic descriptions or portrayals.
As intimated by the author of the original post, there is one action open to me, and that is for me to refuse to be part of the ignominy. What are my values? How do I choose to live? How do I choose to respond?
This is the essence.
Each person has a say in how they respond and I choose not to engage in this kind of journalistic obscenity, cloaked as ‘reality’. I choose not to be a gawker – a voyeur – and instead, take a moment to reflect on what the families of the tragedy must be feeling. Instead of prurient voyeurism, can I take a moment to identify with the victim and their family?
And as I reflected on the post, something else occurred to me – the true obscenity though, is in society’s expression of what is and what isn’t permitted to be shown.
Here’s the thing.
The media comfortably, if sanctimoniously, portrays the most brutal killings and excesses of the ISIS outrages – the hangings, mass machine-gunning executions, the caged burning-alive executions, the beheadings, the crucifixions, the flinging from building of bound homosexuals, and the latest barbaric execution by burning of 4 victims strung upside down. All of these are shown, in colour, in the world’s press, with the gruesome bits sometimes but not always pixelated out. And, yes, there are the sanctimonious ‘horrified’ headlines with mandatory ‘trigger warnings’, but where have we got to where this kind of portrayal is part of our daily fare?
For the record, I have amended one of my original photos in this blog – that of an actual beheaded, bloodied corpse – and replaced it by a photo of an ISIS hostage about to be beheaded. The original photo was too ghastly for many people to bear.
I have a friend from Mars. He often comes to visit me and when he does, he usually asks me questions that I cannot answer.
On his last visit, he asked me how come all of these dreadful execution images are permitted in the daily papers, open for everyone including children, to see, while nipples are forbidden, (not to mention other ‘objectionable’ parts totally outlawed). How come, he asks, does ‘fuck’ have to be written f**k, and the c-word is referred to as the c-word. He even wanted to know why pictures of domestic animals sometimes have their genitalia pixelated out – yes, that is the trend these days!
I have no answers for him.
Have a glance at the following pix.
These are screen grabs from a recent documentary on the Discovery Channel. They show the seasonal prolific breeding of midges. Somewhere, someone found it necessary to ‘censor’ the first picture of 2 midges mating, while the second pic shows millions of them mating.
Not only is it absurd to have to censor a picture of 2 insects mating, but even if this was, again somehow, merely a metaphor to indicate mating, what message do our children learn about normal procreation? It is something ‘bad’, to be censored, to be hidden.
I guess children have to be protected from nipples and other unmentionable and unsee-able body parts, as well as from any depiction of mating – even of 2 midges ‘doing it’.
We teach our children well.
