PLAGUE OF THE CAMERA PHONE GHOULS
People once worried that Britain had become a ‘walk-onby society’. They fretted that social bonds had become so frayed that many of us were shuffling past individuals being robbed or attacked in the street rather than coming to their rescue.
Well, now, it seems, we live in something even worse than a walk-on-by society: a stand-thereand-film society.
The previous habit of putting our heads down and scurrying past a crime or accident looks decent in comparison with the new trend for inanely pointing smartphone cameras at every bad thing that happens.
The walk-on-by Bad Samaritans have given way to the ghoulish voyeurs of the iphone era.
By failing to intervene, these gormless gawpers become potential snuff-movie makers, capturing abuse or violence for posterity, or at least to be quickly posted on social media, rather than trying to stop it.
David pethers, one of the heroes of the terrorist stabbing at leytonstone Tube station on Saturday, has rebuked those who stood by and filmed the bloody event.
As the knifeman waved his weapon, 33-year-old pethers and another man did their best to stop him.
pethers, who had been stabbed in the neck, is furious with the other commuters. ‘There were other adult men standing there, just filming it on their phones,’ he said. ‘There were so many opportunities where someone could have grabbed him.’
pethers was so angry about the filming ghouls that he went for a two-hour walk to calm down.
I feel his fury. There have been numerous incidents and tragedies recently where members of the public have filmed wickedness rather than fighting against it.
In Woolwich, South-east london, in May 2013, scores of people stood filming the two knifemen who’d just fatally stabbed soldier lee Rigby rather than confronting them.
It was left to three brave women to try to calm the killers down and try to save Rigby as he lay dying in the street. Where were the men?
one of the three women, a former schoolteacher, later expressed her dismay that during the eight minutes she was talking to the killers, a large crowd gathered to gawp and none of them stepped in.
lots of people seemed only to want to ‘watch and record the unhappiness of others’, she said. ‘Watching it like it’s on TV.’
That instinct to ‘record the unhappiness of others’ seems to be everywhere.
ReCeNTlY, footage emerged of a 25-yearold man hurling racist invective at an old Turkish immigrant before throwing his Zimmer frame off the bus in North london. The most disturbing thing about the footage is that no one intervenes. The racist’s rant is captured on film, but not challenged.
Similarly, a five-minute video of a woman making vile comments to two Muslim women on another london bus was uploaded onto YouTube last month. What kind of person films such an event for five minutes — with no intervention — as if it were a streetbusking performance?
Unsurprisingly, the instinct to film horribleness is particularly strong among the young. The internet is packed with eyewatering clips of vicious schoolfights or street clashes between rival youths.
Watching these foul clips, I find myself praying someone will intervene and inject some reason. No one does. They’re all too busy recording, their phone arms robotically extended.
less shocking than these videos of violence and abuse — but equally telling of our self-obsessed society — are disaster selfies.
This sickening trend involves people taking photographs of themselves in places where horrible things have happened and posting them on social media.
one of the most offensive examples occurred in the weeks after the beach massacre in Tunisia in June, where 38 holidaymakers (including 30 Britons) were mercilessly gunned down. Tourists flocked to the beach and took selfies at the scene, highlighting the deserted sun-loungers.
Tourists also took selfies of themselves at the site of a horrific bombing in Bangkok in August that killed 20 people. Sagely, a BBC reporter at the scene wondered if we now live in ‘the age of the tragic selfie’.
Much of this macabre rubbernecking seems driven by narcissism.
Those grisly videos and photos are likely to generate plenty of interest on your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram page. It’s a way of saying: ‘look at me!I was there!’
So, as the three women distracted lee Rigby’s killers, a local 22-year-old rapper became an internet hit for tweeting: ‘I just see a man with his head chopped off right in front of my eyes!’
Almost immediately, he got 20,000 Twitter followers and was invited to write for the Guardian on the back of his grossly insensitive tweets. perversely, it’s the watcher who does nothing that we celebrate rather than the Good Samaritan.
one of the tweets — sent immediately after the rapper witnessed the soldier’s murder — was particularly striking: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. That was some movie s***’.
This, I believe, cuts to the heart of the cult of voyeurism: many people now seem to see life as a film, something they simply observe but aren’t players in.
of course, some will argue that the filming of crimes can be helpful, providing crucial evidence for police. This is true.
In the awful case of the elderly man having his Zimmer frame chucked off the bus, the footage was key to his attacker’s arrest.
But that seems secondary to the real motive of this new ghoulishness — which is to turn life into a three-minute video clip for others to be impressed by.
everything must be made into entertainment.
We now seem to view ourselves, not as citizens with a responsibility to look out for one another, but as smartphone ghouls, watching society but not feeling part of it.
of course, rubbernecking is nothing new — I’m sure most of us are guilty of slowing down on the motorway to get a better look at the debris of a bad car crash.
However, this social media age has brought with it a new breed of ghouls — a breed which points to a depressing and scary decline of social solidarity.
In 1977, in a essay called on photography, the American philosopher Susan Sontag wrote about people’s ‘chronically voyeuristic relation to the world’. our ‘notion of what is real’, she argued, has been ‘progressively weakened’.
Sontag, who died in 2004, would no doubt be horrified by how bad this disconnection to reality has become today.
In today’s Britain, when most of us have a phone-camera in our pocket, that voyeurism — perhaps unsurprisingly — has spun out of control.
THe corrosion of community bonds has meshed with the rise of new forms of technology that invite us to record, publish and share everything.
The result is a desensitised public life, where crime victims are photofodder for social media pages and knife attacks are ‘movie s***’ to be swiftly uploaded on YouTube.
Interestingly, war photographers, whose job it is to record horrific things, talk about suffering from a ‘desensitised psyche’, where they risk becoming emotionally immune to the most terrible sights.
Don McCullin — best known for his photos of the Vietnam War — has confessed to this desensitisation.
Will that now happen to all of us?
Tragically, it looks like it already has: when our first thought upon seeing a knifeman attacking commuters is ‘I’d better film this for the internet’, you know we are living in a seriously disconnected, desensitised and depressing world.