Rubbernecking

Following the news that four explosions had occurred across central London on Thursday 7 July, my first instinct was to find a news source and find out more. As I sat watching the events unfold and witnessing pictures of the injured, the emergency services and the remains of the double-decker bus, I began to ask myself why I felt the need to view these macabre scenes.

More than 50 people were killed and 700 injured in these callous attacks on innocent civilians, but how much of their suffering did the world need to see? I was asking the same question back in September 2001 as the World Trade Center collapsed and we saw 2,749 die before our eyes.

Disbelief at the tragic events and the sickening knowledge that human hands had planned and carried out such an evil action leaves you demanding to know why, even though you know that there will be no definitive answer as the events are still unfolding. The news channels are fed the same looped images until they can get the first briefings from the emergency services and the journalists are already pouncing upon the dazed victims in their attempt to quench our thirst for information.

The mobile phone networks were overloaded, so you turn back to the television set in the hope that you may spot a friend or relative that is unreachable, but again that is highly unlikely. Rationally, you know that all you can do is wait or that at some point you will awaken from this nightmare. Unfortunately, the bad dream continues and the interviews with bandaged, bloodied and shocked survivors are repeatedly shown as the initial abstract idea of the horror is brought home with emotional human accounts, bringing realization that it is real.

Watching these images from your living room has shades of slowing down to look at a road accident; uncontrollably you find yourself becoming a rubbernecker and then feeling quietly embarrassed at your uncharacteristic actions. However, within the majority of people, a veiled section of the psyche that has a disturbing interest in the macabre and obscene, it is home to an inquisitiveness that is buried deep in our consciousness and kept secret for fear of being labelled weird, creepy or freakish.

The media provides many disturbing images to its audience, often with little or no warning to content. Some of may have seen the photographs of hundreds of bodies washed up on shore after the Indian Ocean Earthquake or the video of people falling to their death from the Twin Towers, both are images we did not need to see, yet we saw them anyway and the journey to desensitised individual continued.

Information is the new currency, which raises the question 'what type of information?' Are the sickening images to which we are exposed classified as information, offering the experience of both good and bad in life or is what we see on our screens a surrogate for experience. Clifford Stoll suggests, in his book Silicon Snake Oil, that living through an electronic extension of the nervous system dulls many sensations and amplifies too few. Becoming increasingly desensitised to portrayals of violence is less of an issue than becoming numb to the inhumanity of the actual action because when we resign ourselves to more moments of terror, such as the bombs in Madrid and London, then humanity is truly doomed.