I love that there has only been one comment so far on this little football article, and that this is its total content. It highly amuses me to think that someone bothered to type it, not just think it.
Like it or not, humans are just wired to process things visually. You can say a protester was shot in the chest, and we can all understand the consequences and feel bad about it. We can even say that logically, this death shouldn’t mean more than the thousands who’ve died elsewhere under similar circumstances just because it was recorded on video. But the reality is that only when confronted with powerful visual imagery are most people truly able to empathize and fully understand the moment and its depth.
We’re programmed this way. Human culture and communication for thousands of years has been set up almost entirely around visual portrayals in order to bring across points and events in the most effective way possible. From cave drawings to hieroglyphics to Greco-Roman sculpture and art to Medieval tapestries to the Sistine Chapel and onwards to today, we communicate most effectively through pictures.
You can describe a man standing in front of a column of tanks in Tienanmen Square, but without the picture, the impact and poignancy of the moment would have been lost. You can talk about a Vietnamese girl running naked and terrified from her village as its napalmed, but the picture is what communicates the true horror of her circumstance. Likewise, we all can probably imagine a young woman getting shot in the chest by totalitarian police forces, but only through the video is a face assigned to the act, and the true terror, desperation and hopelessness brought across to the viewer. And in this, not only does the single death find more meaning than had it not been recorded, but it also brings greater meaning to all the other deaths that have been reported in these protests which don’t have dramatic videos. I can only speak for myself when I say that from this point forward every time I hear of another protester being killed, my mind no longer simply dismiss it as a sad statistic, but rather will come back to the images of Neda slowly dying in the street, and imagine what hell those others must have endured also. And if others feel the same way, then yes, this video is meaningful and worthwhile indeed.
Comment by Thomas Paladino on a post on Gawker about the shot Iranian protestor Neda, in response to another comment questioning why her death matters more than the other 150 protestors, or even the 300,000 killed by the tsunami a few years ago.
Simply fantastic. I wish I could write this intelligently and eloquently.
