It's hard to imagine there might be anything more shocking than
the massacre last week at two mosques in New Zealand that took the lives of
fifty innocent people, the youngest victim just four years old. All those
faithful folks murdered in their houses of worship. The fact the attack was
carried out by a self avowed white supremacist acting alone: it chills me. Makes
me worry that it could happen anywhere, any place, anytime.
But what really shocked me even more so than the act itself,
was how a small minority of folks on the internet responded to the attack,
which the shooter live streamed on Facebook. With a tiny camera attached to his
headgear, that person broadcast to much of the wired world, his evil actions. Second
by second, minute by minute, in real time, for millions to
view, if they so chose.
Chose to look. Decided to watch. Stared at their screens.
Vicariously participated in a way. But
who would do such a thing? View and spread such vile and obscene imagery?
Try at least a million and a half Facebook users. That's the
number of folks who as the attack unfolded and immediately afterwards, tried to
upload the video onto the wider internet and share it with the rest of the
world. Within minutes of the attack's conclusion you could find raw footage on
YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat, social media platforms that make such
sharing as easy as a few clicks of a mouse.
Who has the heart or the soul to do such a thing? To spread such hate, disrespect and
rejection of basic moral and human decency? The shooting is unfathomable but so
too, for me as a human being and child of God, is the fact that it became
fodder, even "entertainment" for a small group of people lurking in
the hidden shadows of our cyber world--it sickens me. It makes me despair to
think there are folks who actually watched the video, who still search the
internet for a glimpse.
And so the angry calls by citizens and politicians for tech
giants like Google and Facebook to suppress such online hate rise up. We demand
they clean up the internet. Police it so that such abhorrent material--and
other shocking online images and words--be completely erased.
Several years ago, Daniel Quinn, a reporter for the Wall
Street Journal, was kidnapped by ISIS and in
2014 he was executed on camera. I remember thinking then I would never, ever
watch such a video. But an internet search even now still turns up hundreds of
similar videos.
The truth is that no matter how hard tech companies try,
they will never, ever be able to suppress completely such awful and subhuman
images. They will never be able to
censor all the online hate speech in bulletin boards and on Twitter feeds. Never be fully successful in ridding our
cyber world of the more ugly and more sinful reflections of human behavior.
Even in places like China
and Iran,
nations that work in partnership with high tech to limit access to the
internet, stuff still gets through.
The hard reality of the technology laden world we live
within now is that the problem is not technology alone. The problem is also human beings. Us.
Technology is finally just a tool, an amoral container within which all the
very best and the very worst of humanity is on display for all the world to
see, us to see, when we decide to look. Or to look away. Our cyber world is a reflection of humanity,
the heights of goodness to which we can aspire and the depths of depravity to
which we might stoop. Everything in between too. Cat videos and car crashes.
Instant amazing news and fake news. PhD level information and pornography. Live
streamed violence and live streamed family reunions.
The genie is out of the bottle. No going back.
What we can control (or at least try our best to control) is
how we live in this wild wired world. We do have the ultimate power to self
edit and self censor. To put down our phones. To close up our computers. To be
vigilant about where we travel and what we see and read (and what our kids
experience) out there on the internet. We can choose not to participate in
Twitter hate wars or to follow anonymous hateful trolls or to visit the seedier
corners of cyberspace. But still, God help us all.
For when it comes to our brave new world and the question of
whether or not to watch?
That is up to us.
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