As the refugee crisis continues to escalate in Europe, stories about the human toll that this takes on families trying to escape the war in Syria keep hitting the airwaves, including a recent news item about a truckload of more than 70 refugees who died of heatstroke in Austria, victims of a smuggler. On Wednesday, another soon-to-be iconic image of the crisis was published on a number of news sites: A photo of a young Syrian boy’s lifeless body, washed up on the Turkish seashore.
The photo of the boy, reportedly a three-year-old named Aylan Kurdi, triggered a debate not unlike the one that reverberated through the media-sphere after the shooting of Virginia journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward last week, gunned down by a disgruntled former co-worker who shot live video of himself doing the deed.
The fact that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook tend to auto-play embedded videos and auto-show photos in a user’s stream became part of the discussion, since those settings force people to see such disturbing images whether they want to or not. But there’s a larger issue, which is the question of whether we have some kind of public duty to watch these horrific scenes, in order to force ourselves to confront the reality of the violence that is taking place around us.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Continue reading “Sometimes we need to see horrific images like that Syrian boy washed up on the beach”