#ppl who say the internet is killing interpersonal communication just do not understand how it's also enriching it

[dangerscully]

I just had a browse back through some of my IRL adventure-related tags on my blog and then I realised that it’s been 3 years (to the month, I don’t know the date) since I started watching this Dumb Show. And the places that it’s taken me, taken us, as a result... it’s Wild.

I have so many close friends who I’ve spoken to on a daily basis - or near enough to it - for over two of those three years. 

I’m so grateful to the good parts of this community, and I’m so excited that All About Eve is going to bring so many of us together (both physically, and spiritually) all over again over the next few months.

I’ve been lucky, and everyone I’ve spoken to as a result of this fandom is a real good egg. Love yous.

[dreamilyenchantingwasteland]

This was too long for Twitter.

[Tweet: I fucking hate when ppl share graphic animal cruelty stuff on facebook like seeing an animal brutalized makes me physically sick]

@oneunaccountedfor​ said: I've had this argument internally so many times, also about the horrors of war and military action. Ultimately I think I'm with y'all, that it's not good to force such imagery on people. It can feel so goddamn hopeless and desperate though when people are so defiantly ignorant and wicked on account of their ignorance. I want everyone to be horrified of these things—but brutal imagery just makes them horrified of me and the immediate. It doesn't create understanding. It's not a real lesson. I mean, in principle I'm not opposed to harm per se—if the harm is that I'm bringing people to awareness of evil and they are appropriately upset, that's a very moral kind of "harm." But I dunno. There's so much context and I'm with you also that we want to create a sensitive and caring environment, not a cold & heartless one where we constantly psychically bombard each other I wanna find some writings on this, I'm sure they're out there buried in the good social justice discourse. I feel so lost at sea. @dreamilyenchantingwasteland​, any thoughts?

Hmm. Okay, totally off-the-cuff thoughts on this: It’s complicated. (Of course.) But I don’t think what’s complicated is the morality of sharing the message so much as questions about context. Which sort of seems to be what @saladgirl is saying also.

I DO think that when people are confronted with incontrovertible evidence of horrific, brutal acts, it changes them. Photo/video evidence is still considered relatively incontrovertible by most people these days. (This may shift.) And so, for example, I think the success of Black Lives Matter largely comes down to the fact that otherwise sheltered people have recently been “forced” (or “allowed”) to see countless videos of police brutality against black people.

Likewise, I’ve had a number of people tell me recently that they became a vegetarian or vegan because of some documentaries they watched about the horrible conditions of factory farming. Their narrative is usually something along the lines of “I always thought factory farming was bad but I could never quite get myself to quit eating meat — until I saw that movie, and now I can’t get the images out of my head, fuck.” Similarly, we’ve all heard the stories of people turning vegan after working in a slaughterhouse, etc. And, I mean, the Vietnam protests were caused in large part by people seeing the reality of war on TV.

I suspect this kind of brutal imagery doesn’t change the minds of anybody who’s already firmly opposed to the position being put forward — partly because, I suspect, those folks have in some ways already bitten their bullets. Hawks understand that war is brutal. Hunters and farmers know that killing animals is disturbing and disgusting in many ways. Cops and cop-lovers, obviously, are not surprised that police are violent towards black folks. These people just have pre-constructed justification narratives for brutal acts, so when they see them happening “in the flesh” they can apply their narrative and sleep at night.

On the flipside, people who in theory believe that war, police brutality, animal cruelty, domestic violence etc. are wrong but don’t see it in their day-to-day are constantly trying to manage a sort of ethical cognitive dissonance. Their (our) narrative is less about why these acts are categorically okay, and more about how they’re probably not really happening. Not like THAT anyway. How a lot of the stories are apocryphal or exaggerated — PETA being drama queens or whatever — because, surely, the world can’t be THAT terrible of a place? And yet we go around with this sort of quivering anxiety in our guts that maybe the world *is* that terrible a place and we’re not doing anything about it.

So, when we’re shown incontrovertible evidence that, in fact, our worst nightmares are true — black children are being murdered with impunity, dogs are having their noses cut off, women are being brutally raped in their own homes — that low-level anxiety in our guts explodes and we’re left with several choices: find some way to deepen in our denial (but usually with an awareness that we’re doing it), join the “other side” by picking up their narrative about why these things are no big deal/a necessary evil, or take action in line with our values. Most people choose one of the first two, but probably enough people choose the third option (at least for a little while) to justify this strategy. It’s like a very “tough love” way of preaching to the choir.

All of that being said, here’s where we come back to the question of context. It’s one thing to have some doubts about the morality of eating meat, and to decide you’re going to watch an investigative documentary about factory farming order to understand more about how horrible it is, with the full knowledge that this may push you over the edge in terms of not being able to stomach animal products — in fact, maybe that’s (consciously or subconsciously) part of WHY you’ve chosen to watch that documentary.

It’s another thing entirely to wake up in the morning and find that someone has taped pictures of animals being tortured to the ceiling above your bed. That’s an abuse tactic. And while I believe that causing “harm” or discomfort in the interest of encouraging ethical behavior is justifiable, abuse never is.

So, you’ve referred here to people posting images of animal brutality in such a way that they end up in your social media feeds as “forcing” you to see them. And I think this is the crux of the issue. I think we can agree that it’s not bad for these images to exist. These things are happening to animals. Better that they be documented than not documented. Better that those documents be publicly available than that they be hidden or destroyed. Even, arguably, perhaps better that they be broadcast with the intent of raising awareness among those who would be more likely to do something about it if they were reminded, viscerally, that this was happening.

I think we can also agree that it’s wrong to force people to watch triggering content against their will. So, to what degree are we being forced to engage with that content when it’s posted on social media? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I don’t know the answer. Certainly, corporate social media platforms are intentionally designed to captivate us, to in many ways force us to keep using and looking at them even when we don’t want to. I think that may be more of a problem with ad-driven social media platforms than with the people posting troubling content to them, but that’s sort of a whole different ethical can of worms.

But is it okay to broadcast images of animal torture (or police brutality, or domestic violence, or war) on the TV news? (TV and radio usually provide a content warning before they do something like that: “Attention, the following program contains x, y, z and may be upsetting to some viewers.” In fact, it might be interesting to read e.g. some writing by professional journalists about whether or not they felt it was ethically imperative to publish or not publish the Abu Ghraib images — because that was something the field of journalism itself had some conundrums over.) Is social media more akin to the TV news, or to your personal inbox, or is it something else entirely?  Do the cultural contexts and/or feed management options of different types of social media streams matter? Is it more okay to post torture videos on Twitter than it is on Facebook? Tumblr? Reddit?

Again, these aren’t rhetorical questions. I think these are some of the questions we’re all having to wrangle with because we are dealing with a whole lot of very new communications technology and, tbh, we haven’t had much time to establish normative ethics around their use. Journalistic ethics and interpersonal social ethics are blurring together and crashing into each other all over the internet right now, and they’re often at cross-purposes. Eventually, there will be clearer etiquette guidelines about what should be posted where and everyone will know them — and will have to break them with intention if they want to share information that isn’t supposed to be shared there. It’s conversations like the ones we’re having right now that are going to help establish those etiquette norms. But for the time being, it’s a little bit of a free-for-all and I think many folks are taking advantage of that — for good or for ill — to get their content in front of eyeballs without much need for concern about the social consequences of doing so.

So, yeah, it’s complicated. But here are the gut intuitions I personally have about sharing torture videos (animal or otherwise) — because apparently we live in an era of history where “sharing torture videos” is a question of ethics and etiquette we all have to ask ourselves about.

1. As long as torture is happening, it’s good that torture videos (and still images, etc.) exist and are available to the public.

2. Nobody should be sending that shit to your phone directly: No texting it, no sharing it in group chats unless they exist for that purpose, probably no posting it directly to your Facebook wall. Basically, nothing that triggers a notification. You should never click through a notification with no warning and suddenly be face-to-face with images of violence.

3. If you use your social media account primarily for social communication, keeping in touch with family, chatting with friends, etc. you probably want to be pretty sparing and considerate about posting disturbing imagery on it. If you use your social media account primarily for broadcast, political, or awareness raising reasons around this issue, post whatever the hell you want; your followers know what they’re signing up for.

4. It’s always okay to post links to content you’re deeply moved by, with content descriptions, and encourage your friends to watch them if it’s safe for them to do so. It’s polite to remove the preview images.

5. Social media platforms ought to be better designed to give users more control over what they see and don’t see. You should never have to see animal torture images if you don’t want to, even if all of your friends are posting them daily, because there should be ways for you to block/unsubscribe from certain types of content not just entire profiles.

In short: It’s not really an issue of whether or not it’s okay to share disturbing content for awareness-raising reasons. That’s a tactic that has inherent pros and cons, always has, and always will.  It’s an issue of the current ease and scale with which that content can now be shared outside of predictable (i.e. journalistic) contexts — and, because of that, there is an ethical imperative for software developers and designers to give users more granular filtering facility. Precisely for the reason that we are now in a situation where people need to be able to make personal decisions about their level of exposure to things like torture videos. They won’t, though, because the same kind of software that would allow you to opt out of seeing torture videos would also allow you to opt out of seeing ads.