Am I the only one in the world with web access who has not watched Neda Agha-Soltan die?
Her death on a Teheran street—graphically, unflinchingly captured on a cell-phone camera—came during the protests that rocked Iran in mid-June after the clumsily fixed elections that cemented the regime’s grip on power. The roughly 30-second video ricocheted around the web in the days following her shooting, endlessly rewound and replayed, Zapruder-like, until it became the defining, iconic image of the country’s civil unrest and thwarted democracy.
I have refused to watch it.
I first read an account of what will probably go down in history as the “Neda Video” on my friend Craig Stoltz’s blog. Craig’s usually displays a pretty hard-boiled, cynical patina, accumulated from spending years in a newsroom. But as he described his reaction to the video, and his inability to shake off the terrible, stomach-churning spectacle of a young women bleeding out on the pavement, he was clearly rattled.
That was enough for me. I resolved not to watch the video. Not to click on the link that would start it streaming. It seemed like the ultimate intrusion—both of a dying woman’s privacy, and my own. And not too dissimilar from a snuff film.
Just to be clear: I abhor censorship. And I don’t say the same thing about every image that graphically depicts death, such as Robert Capa’s famous image from the Spanish Civil War that captured a Republican soldier the fleeting instant he was shot. Or from still-raw history, the photo of the so-called “Falling Man” suspended in mid-air as he tumbled from the World Trade Center on 9/11.
But those victims were unrecognizable, unnamed, and so still unknown. The images were symbols of world-changing events. They could not be linked to 24-year old students with family, friends, and MySpace accounts.
As digital cameras are built into ever-more devices such as cell phones and PDAs, it seems like every event, no matter how sacred or profane, will eventually be recorded and uploaded to the web, for everyone to see, gawk, and comment upon.
And surfing the web has it’s own unique, irresistible momentum. Like rhesus monkeys in some giant globe-girdling digital lab, we’ve all been trained by years of sitting in front a screen to keep perpetually clicking on the links displayed before us. Taste, decency, privacy be damned.
(I know, I know: I’m dating myself as antediluvian by mentioning these concepts.)
The seductiveness of the Web is that everything—everything!—is just a click away. The lure of the computer mouse can be just as silkily irresistible as the serpent in the Garden.
In those cases it might be good to ask: “WWUWD?” (What Would Uncle Walter Do?)
Sometimes the only decent thing is to look away.
Brave New Whirl 