On Monday there was a flurry of shocked twittering among my friends because Rolling Stone magazine had published a fresh set of photographs of horrors from Afghanistan: American soldiers posing with slaughtered civilians as if they were hunting trophies; American soldiers playing cards for body parts – you get the picture. The question is whether to click on it, too. What do we learn from a picture that we can't learn from its description, and should we really want to learn it?
Lots of people ask whether it is right to publish pictures of atrocities; my question is whether it is right to look at them. In part this is because the decision to publish them is made by fewer people, even in a net-connected world where every link is also a kind of republication. It's very easy to be confronted with a link you feel you should not click on. So is there any justification for this feeling?
The obvious one is that you will be repulsed and horrified. From tubgirl to goatse, there are a number of thoroughly nasty pictures, designed to upset people, which every 15-year-old boy in the developed world must have seen by now and spent several hours working out how to make unsuspecting girls click on them. But I don't think these are corrupting: they are just the digital equivalent of Calvin's grossings out of Susie Derkins.
Repulsion and horror are not in themselves harmful, though easy enough to burn out on. But there are further steps. The first, I think, is desensitisation. If you are looking at something for the sake of the thrill it gives, you need to watch more and more and preferably more extreme, to get the same thrill. Watching tubgirl once never did anyone lasting harm. Looking at it 500 times is a symptom of something wrong, and probably a cause of further wrongness, too.
The next wrongness is not desensitisation exactly, but a kind of learned failure to forget and a consequent loss of proportion. I am thinking here of disaster porn: the first I remember was images of the Challenger disaster. Watched once, it told something: after seeing it 10 times, it was simply treating the deaths as entertainment. Much worse was the footage of the planes hitting the twin towers, which was unavoidable in the autumn of 2001 on US TV. I think the constant repetition of an image best forgotten did serve as a commercial for war, while making it harder and harder to understand why anyone might want to fight the US. So I didn't watch. But it took some small effort.
Of course, the other side in those wars had their own and deeply damaging images: some were pictures of innocent victims, designed to promote a thirst for revenge; others, much more sinister, were beheading videos designed to promote the thirst to kill. I don't think it is a morally good thing to click on these just to know what they are like. There are some things we ought not to see because they stir up difficult and painful emotions, which have no constructive outlet.
Of course, sometimes there is a constructive outlet. The pictures and videos from Abu Ghraib did bring home what was happening there in a way that nothing else could have done, and promoted a great wave of revulsion that helped to get the place closed down.
The Rolling Stone pictures, though, are recognisably part of the same tradition as beheading videos. They were made to depict as enjoyable some rather horrible things, and published to show that they are in fact shocking, or they ought to be. But we can't, in fact, know which effect they are going to have. Most readers will be horrified; some will no doubt be turned on in a rather horrible way. What I think is really unlikely is that they will change the mind of anyone who sees them. The majority who think that war is terrible because it kills civilians will be strengthened in their conviction. The minority who think that war is fun because it gives an opportunity to kill civilians will also find evidence to gratify them.
So I won't click, and I don't think you should either.
This isn't an argument about censorship, although it is obviously related. But there is one not-so-obvious link, too, to the standard liberal arguments against censorship, which says we should not stop adults from making their own decisions. But the corollary of this is obviously that not everyone will click on pictures like that, and quite probably that no one ought to, even if banning things would be the greater evil.
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