I just watched this documentary about crocodiles in northern Australia, featuring an anecdote of a father-son fishing trip. I just assumed the guy was going to escape. But no, I sat and watched a graphic reenactment of a 17-year-old kid’s father being attacked and killed by a crocodile right in front of him. Sheesh! I’m glad the boys were already gone to bed.
You know, I believe in the free flow of information, and that means there are going to be some things I hear and see that I don’t like. I get a little depressed, though, at the desensitization to truly disturbing things we’ve undergone as a society (really since the coming of age of the Web).
I still remember vividly the first thing I clicked on and immediately wished I hadn’t. It was a photograph of an Iraqi soldier that had been run over by a tank during Desert Storm. You really don’t have to see that to know it’s horrible, do you?
One thing that regularly gets me too are news sites making 911 call recordings available. “Listen to a mother’s frantic call as her toddler son lies unconscious and bleeding,” or somesuch. Seriously? What kind of a person clicks that link?
As tacky and coarse as I can be, this is something that makes me feel like an old man.
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“Bo, I miss you. Please come back.”
– Bo’s discarded VHS tape of Faces of Death I and II.
See, some significant percentage of those were fake, and the ones that were real were often grainy enough (or otherwise degraded) to blunt their impact.
It’s all just there now. Any schmuck with a few hundred dollars can go to Best Buy and get still and video equipment as good or better than anything that was available at any price 20 years ago, and comparable to equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars ten years ago. USB cable, a click on an Upload button, and there you go.
I’m not certain we’re better for that.