Viral Violence and the End of the Powerful Image

The fear of contagious media violence was put forth most forcefully and articulately in Videodrome. So its odd that I was going to screen that movie today for my History of Media class while the whole thing seems to unfold on the news in front of me.

On Keith Olberman's MSNBC show, an FBI pundit advises MSNBC not to play the videos that the Virginia Tech killer has sent to NBC News. He says that while describing the existence of these videos would inform us without causing us harm, the kind of visceral images depicted in the videos results in, at the very least, copycat attempts, and at the worst, copycat murderers. Brian Williams makes an allusion to the potential "negative social consequences" of showing the videos. But its too late - all major media networks have played the videos. Let the experiment begin.

MSNBC is desperately showing totally unrelated clips of heroic acts performed by people over the past few years, including a man who selflessly risked his life to save someone from being hit by a subway in New York. Would this "balance things out," making up for the contagious visceral images? They play the videos, but seem to be desperately apologizing for playing the videos at the same time. The whole thing plays out as a self-loathing attempt to keep people informed.

At moments like this, I almost feel pity for TV news, and TV in general. Perhaps the logic behind airing the videos is that they will be on the Internet, and TV news is competing with the internet, so they need to show the videos. But the videos have a power on TV that they don't have on YouTube or on the internet. Hangings and beheadings have been on the internet for years now, but there is no palpable fear around these videos. I think this has something to do with the fact that its easier to resist clicking on a video or going to a website than to turn away from a news broadcast. And with a news broadcast, there is a human face, a trusted anchor, a personality. The internet is just this anonymous, wide-open repository of human desires, while the TV aspires to tell us what's important. But right now, TV is clearly going through an identity crisis.

There's this idea that by disseminating information about the violence, we are causing it to happen again. If we do not air the image, if we elect to show the heroes instead of the villains, then it will be less likely to happen in the future.

But we're back to this issue of looking at freaks (real or fake), of seeing an unpleasant side of humanity that we had been able to ignore. First, we gawk or laugh. Then we feel guilty about giving them our attention. But then, we get over it, and we assimilate unusual behavior. Given the increased visibility of unusual behavior that is just starting, we're going to have a lot of assimilating to do.

In any case, these videos are likely to change the public understanding of online videos, to bridge the gap between the beheading snuff videos and vlogs. Perhaps a video conversation, with more vlogs than ever, will erupt. We'll normalize these new images by drowning them in our own. He'll be quoted, edited, remixed, parodied, bootlegged, and forgotten. With its unending torrent of vlogs, online video has reduced video from icon to conversation. At the end of last semester, my students and I speculated about the impact of the immanent video of Saddam's hanging. Sure enough, someone was there with a cellphone camera and several iterations of the video ended up on YouTube. But what impact did it really have? Where is the Saddam hanging now? Buried under a mountain of Colbert Report clips and hockey fights. Out of a need to dis-empower the killer, we will continue this trend. This may be a huge step towards the total disappearance of the power of the video image. Maybe the power the video image was more about the exclusive ability to create and disseminate than its verisimilitude.

I ended up not showing Videodrome in class, instead using the time to go over the history of the contagious media violence theory, as well as an informal discussion of the idea. As bizarrely apt as a screening of Videodrome would've been, I think that the decision not to show it was one of the best I've ever made. I suppose that by not screening it, I bought into its central premise: that videos can be deadly viruses, infecting us with murderous or suicidal inclinations. This time, at least, conversation seemed like the best way to communicate.