Friday, April 8, 2011

And the World Watched...

       Friday, March 11th, 2011, disaster struck: Japan was hit by a tsunami that was created by an 8.9 earthquake. And the world watched.
       News channels across the globe featured information, pictures, and videos of the on-going disaster. Channels such as CNN and BBC had live news coverage, and people could see the horror going on in Japan from the comfort of their own homes. We could watch it as it happened: families torn apart, architecture demolished, people fleeing for their lives. This is what technology has progressed to - watching the disaster as it takes place.
       This technology is not necessarily negative, seeing as how search and rescue teams can have a good visual on where people may be trapped or injured, and the amount of damage and its severity can be assessed easily.
       On the other hand, it is horrible to watch another person's death, or the destruction of an entire civilization. For example, the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili is a recent tradegy that many of you are likely to remember. He was going around the final turn of the luge at the Olympic training run in Whistler, BC, during the 2010 Winter Olympics, when he flipped off of his sled and flew into a pole. Millions of people around the world watched this tragic crash, his death, on live television and news channels before the video was pulled from the air at request of the family. Does anything seem wrong with this picture to you? How about the fact that it took for the family to ask to have it removed for it to be so? Shouldn't our society have realized our obvious lack of empathy without having it pointed out to them? Or have we evolved to being a civilization so engrossed with harsh realities that we do not even consider ourselves cold-hearted?
      While live footage of disasters can be useful in discovering what actually happened, it can overstepping the line into other people's privacy. We look at this as our need of staying informed about our world, but is it actually our hunger for entertainment that drives us to videotape, air, and watch such catastrophes?



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