My must read of the day is "Don’t Look: Beheadings, Stolen Nudes and Choosing to Be Decent," by James Poniewozik, in Time:
We live in the age of the image as weapon. Sometimes the crime is petty and lurid, as when, over Labor Day weekend, a cache of nude photographs of female celebrities was released online and spread through social media. Sometimes the crime is horrific and deadly, as on Tuesday, when ISIS released a video of the beheading of Steven Sotloff, the second journalist the group murdered on tape in recent weeks. (Disclosure: Sotloff contributed reporting to TIME.)
The two acts, clearly, are not nearly the same. One is theft, one is murder. One is a digital violation, one is physical violence.
But they have something important in common: the reliance on technology that makes it seamless to spread an image, almost instantly, across the world. And the reliance on an older piece of machinery to complete the violation: The human eye. The human brain. You. […]
I’m not saying you’re evil if you watch one of these videos, or peep a stolen celebrity nudie. It’s about something less grandiose than evil, less widely discussed–but at least as important: decency. Decency, at least a very big part of it, is knowing that you are permitted to do a thing–it’s physically possible, it’s not illegal, no one can stop you–yet you shouldn’t anyway.
"Sometimes," the piece concludes, "the most powerful, most decent thing you can do is not to look."
Yes, sometimes that is the case—and I largely agree with Poniewozik’s points when it comes to the naked pictures of celebrities, but what bothers me about this piece is that there’s an implicit assumption that people internalize these images in a manner that benefits the perpetrator.
That’s not necessarily the case.
When it comes to beheading videos, the aim of those is not merely that "you see them" and watching them does not "literally complete their purpose." The aim and purpose of those videos is two-fold. They’re for recruitment and, more than anything, to instill fear in the viewers and make them complacent so they’ll bend to the will of the terrorists.
Looking isn’t the problem. The intent is what matters.
I can’t argue that there is value in seeing private, nude pictures of Jennifer Lawrence (or the other people whose names I cannot remember because my consumption of pop culture is really lagging these days). If you look at those, you are likely feeding the demand for more instances like it to occur, and you are helping those who stole the pictures further humiliate their victims. However, it’s inaccurate to put that in the same category as beheading videos—and this is where I think Poniewozik is wrong.
There is a risk of showing too much, to where at some point viewers become desensitized to the images. That is bad for everyone. There’s a balance there that news agencies often have to find, but this blanket encouragement for self-censorship presupposes there is little value in seeing any of it and it underestimates the ability of the average person to look upon something horrific with "decent" eyes.
People do not have to watch any of it. That’s a choice everyone should get to make for themselves, but you can choose to look at horrific images with decent eyes. You have not abandoned morality because of what you’ve seen. In fact, in many cases you’ve emboldened it by bearing witness to the vile acts and refusing to give the perpetrators the cowering reaction they seek.
As individuals we get to decide how we internalize these images, and it’s often important to see the juxtaposition of what you know to be right with depravity of others. That leads to far more decency than it inhibits.