A Creeping Sickness
I was watching the Fox Report on Friday and there were showing a live police chase on there. I always feel they shouldn't air such things live in case something horrible happens. Shepard Smith, newscaster, seemed to be getting nervous himself when the man stopped the car and seemed to be getting out. My brother was watching the show with me and had the remote control. Thankfully some gut feeling made John suddenly turn the channel over. After about two minutes he turned back… Shepard Smith was saying how very sorry he was that the viewing public saw what they did, that it was supposed to be on a delay but hadn't been. It was pretty obvious something horrible had happened on live television. I searched the internet later in the evening to find out just what had happened. It turned out that the man was shown live on television shooting himself in the head (how truly horrible, I really hope no children were watching at the time). That poor man, I don't know the details of why he killed himself or anything else about him but it’s deeply distressing to think he felt he had to take his own life. What shocked me, maybe more, was what I read on the web about what happened next. Apparently footage of the man ending his life quickly appeared online along with gifs made from moving images of those final moments, and these were spread by 1000s of people within hours to their Facebook pages, blogs and tumblr accounts. I myself have a tumblr account, I use it for harmless images of people, places, animals and films I love (images of things that make me happy). But I have come across violent graphic images on tumblr while randomly exploring other peoples tumblr accounts before now, I've also had to stop following other peoples blogs that I might have initially followed due to some shared interest (I tend to follow people that post up a lot of vintage images, for example) after suddenly being confronted with a shocking image they themselves have posted up. That happened just last week in fact… someone had posted vintage footage of a man walking across a very narrow rope between two skyscrapers and falling off. The footage had been made into a gif so the moment where he falls to his death was repeated over and over. Along with the moving gif were details explaining that the footage was of this poor man’s actual death. I noticed this gif had been reclogged 1000s of times. Why would anyone want to look at a man's death in the first place, let alone putting the moving footage on loop so they can view it repeatedly in quick succession? There seems to be a growing sickness online... a growing blood lust amongst some younger people, it reminds me of tales of the dark ages when people enjoyed turning up to public hangings. I think there will come a time when the internet will have to be regulated. In fact, I think that time is already here.