My social media feed has taken a bloody turn in the last few weeks, and I am hardly alone. Along with the usual Twitter wisecracking and comments on incremental news, I have seen bodies scattered across fields and hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza. I have read posts from reporters who felt threatened, horrified and revolted.
Geopolitics and the ubiquity of social media have made the world a smaller, seemingly gorier place. If Vietnam brought war into the living room, the last few weeks have put it at our fingertips. On our phones, news alerts full of body counts bubble into our inbox, Facebook feeds are populated by appeals for help or action on behalf of victims, while Twitter boils with up-to-the-second reporting, some by professionals and some by citizens, from scenes of disaster and chaos. Now, front row view For most of recorded history, we have witnessed war in the rear-view mirror. It took weeks and sometimes months for Mathew Bradys, and his associates, photos of the bloody consequences of Antietam to reach the public. And while the invention of the telegraph might have let the public know what side was in ascent, images that brought a remote war home frequently lagged.
Then came radio reports in World War II, with the sounds of bombs in the background, closing the distance between men who fought wars and those for whom they were fighting. Vietnam was the first war to leak into many American living rooms, albeit delayed by the limits of television technology at the time. CNN put all viewers on a kind of war footing, with its live broadcasts from the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
But in the current news ecosystem, we don’t have to wait for the stentorian anchor to arrive and set up shop. And those journalists on the ground begin writing about what they see, often via Twitter. It is unedited, distributed rapidly and globally, and immediately responded to by the people. Points to ponder Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to care more. It also invites them to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be changed by local, political intervention.
So now that war comes to us in real time, do we feel helpless or empowered? Do we care more, or will the ubiquity of images and information desensitise us to the point where human suffering loses meaning when it is part of a scroll that includes a video of your niece twerking? Oh, we say as our index finger navigates to the next item, another one of those.
