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Online vids of atrocities

#1 User is offline   Mezla PigDog 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 01:42 PM

I was reading the Groove messing thread in the Inn the day that reporter and her camera man in the US were shot live on air. Some folk had watched the gunmans video and were saying how bad it was. I realised that I've never watched any of the videos that pop up online alarmingly often and I can't figure out why anyone else would either. There have been lots of ISIS vids of beheadings off hostages and various atrocities and propaganda. I've never been tempted to search for them or click on them. I see that there is a kind of political reason not to look because it is what terrorists want us to do and I'll admit that I refuse to get embroiled in the current culture of terror that the Western media laps up but that's not the first reason why I don't look. I don't look because I don't want to see someone murdered. I'll admit to curiosity on the subject though, I'm as guilty as anyone of rubbernecking when I'm going by an accident on the motorway but I feel like I'm one of the only people in the world who has never seen someone beheaded! I'm not complaining, I just find it weird. So why do people look and do they ever regret it? And do any other people not look?
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#2 User is offline   LinearPhilosopher 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 01:58 PM

View PostMezla PigDog, on 28 August 2015 - 01:42 PM, said:

I was reading the Groove messing thread in the Inn the day that reporter and her camera man in the US were shot live on air. Some folk had watched the gunmans video and were saying how bad it was. I realised that I've never watched any of the videos that pop up online alarmingly often and I can't figure out why anyone else would either. There have been lots of ISIS vids of beheadings off hostages and various atrocities and propaganda. I've never been tempted to search for them or click on them. I see that there is a kind of political reason not to look because it is what terrorists want us to do and I'll admit that I refuse to get embroiled in the current culture of terror that the Western media laps up but that's not the first reason why I don't look. I don't look because I don't want to see someone murdered. I'll admit to curiosity on the subject though, I'm as guilty as anyone of rubbernecking when I'm going by an accident on the motorway but I feel like I'm one of the only people in the world who has never seen someone beheaded! I'm not complaining, I just find it weird. So why do people look and do they ever regret it? And do any other people not look?

Curiosity can be a great motivator. Even if you know you shouldn't do it, doesn't mean you won't. Im sure we've all had experiences with forbidden fruit over the years, it just so happens this fruit is poisonous.
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#3 User is offline   D'rek 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 02:07 PM

I've looked before, but similar to you, Mez, I don't really feel any desire, instinct or inclination to do so. The times that I have looked before were because I had some reason to do so - ie one was part of a debate I was having about violence in media and someone was using one of those videos as supporting evidence to their point.

The times that I have looked... it's weird, I find myself feeling pretty detached from them. Action movies, video games, etc, have built up this cultural norm of seeing violence and death have so much drama or gravitas, that then I find seeing the plain reality of it seems strangely surreal and, well, "unrealistic". Then when reason kicks back in the detachment feels really disturbing.


Another issue worth discussing here might be the usage of these footages by media outlets. Some of the newspapers in Canada today put on their front page an image from the footage the recent killer in the US recorded as he was doing the deed. It's a picture from the gunman's point of view, gun held up, looking straight at the anchorwoman he killed. Seems pretty extreme to put right on the front page of a newspaper that will be lying around on buses/offices and sticking out the front of the newspaper stands - I'm sure a lot of people would rather have not seen that image but will stumble upon it accidentally today.

View Postworrywort, on 14 September 2012 - 08:07 PM, said:

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#4 User is offline   Vengeance 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 02:13 PM

I try not to watch any of them. Especially if someone dies in it. I feel that watching someone deliberately kill someone is justifying that murder or at least being party to it. At the very least it is giving attention to someone who does not deserve attention. I will watch car accidents though.
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#5 User is offline   QuickTidal 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 02:16 PM

View PostD, on 28 August 2015 - 02:07 PM, said:

Another issue worth discussing here might be the usage of these footages by media outlets. Some of the newspapers in Canada today put on their front page an image from the footage the recent killer in the US recorded as he was doing the deed. It's a picture from the gunman's point of view, gun held up, looking straight at the anchorwoman he killed. Seems pretty extreme to put right on the front page of a newspaper that will be lying around on buses/offices and sticking out the front of the newspaper stands - I'm sure a lot of people would rather have not seen that image but will stumble upon it accidentally today.


I saw that, the Toronto Sun did that shot for the cover...and I nearly contacted the newspaper to say how tactless and disconnected it is to not only put such a tragic and SCARY moment on the cover...but to give that assclown the press he so dearly wanted by using his own footage for the photo (he said he wanted to start a race war apparently?)...but then I realized that it was the Sun...the worst and most dirty rags of the newspapers we have (like the conservative TMZ of the printed word) and they would not give two shits if people complained.

But I mean yeah, I avoided all the video of the tragedy as I didn't want those visuals in my head...but of course the Sun ruined that when I was casually walking to the subway and saw the cover with the image.

So basically, fuck the newspaper for doing that to not only their readers, but the casual observer.

And in that vein, at what point did the idea of "not giving the criminal the press they wanted" turn into "show everyone everything because they are going to see it anyways"? I mean if I were the victim's families, I'd be FURIOUS at the press this shitstain got over the last two days.

Mez, I'm with you and d'rek, I don't watch usually. I'm sure the draw is there in my head...but I can't unsee stuff very easily and it would haunt me really badly.
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#6 User is offline   Andorion 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 04:27 PM

I have watched a few of these, some by accident, some out of curiousity and now I absolutely do not watch them anymore.

My first one has probably been watched by everybody. 9/11. I was a kid. It was on the news. It was just surreal. It didn't feel like I was watching actual thousands of people die.

Others have been videos on dodgy news sites I didn't know enough not to visit.

Now I don't/can't watch these videos. i read the text (if any) to understand what happened and thats it.

As to why they get so much exposure, so many views, I think thats a multi-angled problem.

In the crazed hunt for ratings and sales media outlets wil do anything, cross any line. I think the hacking scandal proved that. From their point of view there is a sound business reason to exhibit these things. especialy sites that rely on clicks to pay their way.

As to why people watch, there maybe two aspects to it.

Firstly most human beings have an inherent morbid aspect to their curiousity. There are countless examples where items, sites, relics associated with death become objects of viewing. When executions were public, there were huge crowds. It was a social affair where children were brought.. Nowadays death is taboo. It is private, almost secret. But while the general social perception of death may have changed I do not think individual interest/curiousity regarding death has. And these types of death are even more taboo. These are violent, gory. If you trawl youtube a bit you will find accident videos (often fake) labelled actual death. People want to see other human beings die in a violent fashion.

The other aspect is I think a cultural obsession with reality. Most reality shows are scripted. This is widely known. Yet people still crave them. Videos like these provide a raw, unscripted reality, a sort of primal experience which I think can be seen as something akin to an adrenalin rush.

Keep in mind that in both these assertions I speak of a particular group of people, not society as a whole. tastes are not universal
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#7 User is offline   Terez 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 04:55 PM

We were just discussing this on another forum I visit too. The only videos I have deliberately watched are those of cop killings, to see for myself whether the shooting was justified. Fortunately the ones I have seen (Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, etc.) were not too graphic or dramatic. I was still reluctant to watch them though.

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#8 User is offline   Illuyankas 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 05:31 PM

I was linked a video of the aftermath of an ISIS mass killing, where the decapitated bodies of dozens of young men were tied up to a long spiked fence, with their heads jammed on the spikes immediately above them. The camera panned down the fence, showing each corpse and head in turn, as pedestrians walked by without looking. I remember watching it in a state of appalled... not quite disbelief, but not quite instant acceptance of it either, until the most surreal aspect of the video appeared; for one of the young men they'd killed, someone had stuck a straw in the mouth of the severed head, and jammed the fast food drink cup it had most likely come from into the open stump of the neck. I paused the video there, absorbing the fact and humanizing reminder that someone had decided that doing this was funny, then closed it.

I feel some of the draw to videos like those are attempting to relate all this to our shiny clean unmarred life, with no death or obvious suffering visible. Very few of you will have seen a person die, and even few more than one person. We're disconnected, and a lot of people attempt to emulate that connection by watching these happen. The point I took away from videos like these, or the ones where trucks crush people and their innards splatter across the road, or the Russian conscript having his throat cut open with a knife, or a hostage being decapitated by a chainsaw, or a US airstrike hitting a hilltop with such force that a man has his arm blown off from the blastwave alone, is that we're all incredibly fragile despite our brains blithely assuming otherwise, and we could all be easily dead if just one coincidence rolled the other way, so we should enjoy the time we've managed to scrape ourselves into by the skin of our teeth with each other and seek to make the best of it, cause it's not invincible and neither are we.
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#9 User is offline   Nicodimas 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 05:59 PM

I think I have a simple explanation.. Just recently this came up with that reporter shooting.

It's your choice and you should question each time why your are doing this of course. I mean.. I don't think anyone should go searching for them obviously that's not healthy.

Simple: I don't want to be one of those people that puts there head in the sand. That looks away from seeing the world as it is. That's a type of evil in itself.

Illukanyas states it well most people are unexposed to true levels of violence in their everyday lives.

Regrets? There's this one that shows a crazy person gunning a cop down. That's the worst one I've seen as that bothers me as you can empathize the situation, the pain and fear. It's horrible. On the flip side that video gets me to gun range to practice practice practice...
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#10 User is offline   amphibian 

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Posted 28 August 2015 - 07:55 PM

I think Nicodimas is onto something when he says viewing deaths like this should be an "opting in" choice, rather than an "opt out" choice.

A few meta thoughts:

- The action of casually watching TV without much control of content being played (which is how most of us watch the news when we watch it) imposes a distance and/or unreality upon what we see there. If we are not already invested in it, it's often difficult to spark empathy or connection to what's being played - which is why TV constantly reinvents itself to create and maintain those stronger connections.

- So by showing images/videos of people dying, the TV/news people do several things: 1) they present what has happened at a remove to us in a form that is usually authoritarian or framed in other ways, 2) they remove the ability to choose to consume these things (which is a choice that should be exercised both ways to prevent us from slipping into unreality), 3) they shift the goalposts of what is "commonplace" in a subtle way that normalizes murder.

I'm not huge on downstream effects, but I do think in media (TV, movies, games, books), we are over-served with death and situations in which quick, decisive, and brutal murder is the "right" action. That adds up and moves goalposts from an early age.

I was in Nepal during the summer of 2002, when the Maoist insurrection was ongoing. The government forces would engage in asymmetrical/guerilla warfare with the Maoists and both sides would trumpet their wins by publicizing dead bodies in photos, short videos, and even long videos with the camera grotesquely dwelling on each dead Maoist to showcase that the Maoists were either deservingly dead or martyrs to a corrupt government. The same logic of shocking the viewer with a death of another person was present on both sides and something interesting happened.

The effect of so much dead-body propaganda was that the average people became inured to it. It was so commonplace that a shot-to-death person wasn't remarkable. The "splash" effect faded, and when that happened, the goalposts were moved so far that it took multiple deaths, particularly gruesome deaths, or something extra to grab attention. And then even that faded. Illy's story above about the spiked heads shows just how far the splash effect can fade.

That fade is good and bad in a few different ways: it's harder to get attention by murdering, so less people will do it, but at the same time, it's normalizing murder, which is a really diabolical situation.

Normalizing murder is bad because then it becomes an acceptable part of the force continuum for enforcing laws - which has happened all over (often with racial, tribal or religious framework guiding actions) and should happen much less often.

So I think it's ok for media to make spaces where viewers can see videos, pictures and so on of horrible things. But aside from rare cases, it should be an opt-in type of presentation. (The rare cases being a nebulous term on purpose because it's hard to categorize beforehand the presentation of horrible, yet very real things and to diminish what is likely a tragedy for some people to something less deserving of attention than a tragedy for many people)
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#11 User is offline   Traveller 

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Posted 29 August 2015 - 08:38 PM

I haven't watched any of this stuff online. I really don't want that in my head. It's not a head-in-the-sand attitude.. I see people die all the time in my job; young, old, long term illness or sudden trauma. It's a humbling experience.

What I see is a removal of personal dignity.. at the point of death, a person becomes a 'body', and their rights disappear instantly, to become, in some cases, propaganda tools, news stories, 'public' property.. even just entertainment for the curious.

When I see a guy on a trolley, the clothes he put on that morning cut from top to bottom to aid resuscitation, his shoes still on.. but dead, lying there as everyone clears up and fills in paperwork, I can't help but look at him and wonder about his whole life that has lead up to that point. His body is no longer his, in a way, so I make an effort to cover, clean and at least give him back his dignity in those moments before relatives arrive, or even if there is no one.

People murdered on film have their right to die in peace and privacy violated, and I am never going to purposefully try to be a part of that. People are far too quick to complain about the invasion of privacy by the press, while reading the paper that pays the people taking the pictures, something else I can't get my head around.

It's about respect, too. Aid workers, archaeologists, anyone beheaded or murdered on film; those poor reporters.. I'm pretty damn sure they wouldn't have wanted their deaths to be out there in the public domain as they are. I'll read about the tragedy, sure, but I'm not going to go looking for footage of the moment they lost their lives.

This post has been edited by Traveller: 29 August 2015 - 08:40 PM

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#12 User is offline   HoosierDaddy 

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Posted 29 August 2015 - 09:35 PM

I refused to watch it. I don't want to give the murderer the power that they wanted; especially in this instance where he was filming it for his own gratification. The only one I've ever watched was the Cleveland kid being shot, and you couldn't really see anything in it but it was still massively disturbing.

Frankly, there's enough in life to be disturbed and upset about to needlessly encourage rage. I'll leave the watching to peoples' whose jobs are to do that. I wonder about these things because Reddit has those awful subs like "watchpeopledie" and "morbidreality" that are just death porn.

Good topic, Mez.
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#13 User is offline   Aptorian 

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Posted 30 August 2015 - 01:21 PM

I am subscribed to r/WTF on Reddit which is sort of a roulette wheel of the mundane, the weird and scary and some times human depravity on such a sick level that it just makes you want to crawl out of your own skin. I've seen picture and videos in that subreddit that will shock me but at this point in my "internet-viewing career" I have seen so much shit on things like rotten, ebaum, 4chan, etc. that seeing death or mutilation on camera is something I can sit and watch eating breakfast and not blink an eye. That subreddit has become more interesting for the back-stories and discussions going on in the discussions section rather than the actual imagery.

Reflecting on it I think there is a kind of partially numb, partially bored part of my brain that looks for something new, something more crazy than the last image. A sort of interest that leads to finding ever more extreme content. The same way that eventually your run of the mill porn just doesn't cut it any longer and one day you find yourself googling Albino-tranny-pregnant-horsefuck-teen-cougar-scat like this is the most normal thing in the world.

It's not like I actually want to watch this stuff. It's not like I go looking for it, but as it pops up in the feed of Reddits frontpage I can easily be looking at funny picture with a caption, an Ask-science thread on Mars colonization - Suddenly a video of a guy being stabbed to death in a Venezuelan prison - then a discussion on favorite breakfast cereals. No reaction really. It's just more content mixed into the regular consumption of media.

Like Illy mentions above it feels sort of grounding. The stark realization that life is fragile and we as a species are capable of doing terrible things to ourselves and the people around us. I don't think I would ever use the term entertainment about it. More like fascination.

I would like to add though that there is a huge difference between watching pictures or seeing footage of the aftermath of an accident and actually watching a video with audio. There is a distance that is immediately shattered the moment you hear the sound of suffering. For example the video mentioned above about a guy shooting a news crew.

This post has been edited by Apt: 30 August 2015 - 01:23 PM

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#14 User is offline   Macros 

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Posted 24 September 2015 - 09:55 AM

Opting in is a bad idea, some idiots will get it into their heads its a competition to be the most viewed killing.
Hating to reference an awful film, but Kill With Me sort of touches on the idea (on a different tangent but still) that watching these videos gives the perpetrators what they wanted, and makes you party to the crime, if no one watched, no media outlets showed them, would they bother videoing the beheadings or other things at all? Not likely.
As for footage of accidents or other atrocities filmed by neutrals and broadcast I don't think they should be fired around the internet virally either, I don't watch that shit, the more we watch it, the more media outlets push it, they think its what people want, and what will get them ratings.
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#15 User is offline   Gredfallan Ale 

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Posted 25 September 2015 - 09:56 AM

Well, aside from the privacy issues already voiced better than I ever could by Traveller, there's one thing that prevents me from watching those kind of videos.

I don't really mind gore in itself, I don't mind dealing with wounds in real life (I'm a first aid volunteer), but what I can't watch is someone who's getting hurt. It's almost like I'm experiencing the pain itself, without feeling pain localized anywhere in my body (the sensation of course lacks afferent signals travelling up from body like they would when experiencing actual pain). However, both the emotional and rational components of pain are there. It's really unpleasant. It happens with things as simple as seeing a needle puncturing skin, despite me not minding getting an injection myself.

I get the same reaction when (thinking of) inflicting pain on others, as that also involves a representation of someone getting hurt. It seems that the border between representing such a thing for myself or others is not that well defined in my cognitive system. However, as mentioned, I don't have a problem with seeing wounds. I'm actually very calm in dealing with wounds and I've encountered things like open fractures (it wasn't the nicest thing to look at, I tell you that).

Occasionally, though, despite knowing how I'm going to react, curiosity wins and I still watch. (I've seen the reporter footage that started this topic.)
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#16 User is offline   Studlock 

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Posted 25 September 2015 - 11:49 AM

No, I've seen enough horrendous shit in real life to want to subject myself to that in virtual form (fun fact, I had to go with brother to identify one his best friends who was shot and then burnt alive in his car--don't deal drugs kids!). And honestly I realize I sound like some edgy kid right now but violence was common growing up and I'm tired of it.

This post has been edited by Studlock: 25 September 2015 - 11:50 AM

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