The video from the sun-sentinel web site of the homeless guy getting beaten with a bat was viewed over 100,000 times in the first couple of days. I'm sure the other news operations saw similar activity. Crazy.
you could make a pretty good ethical case for putting the video out there for everyone to see. It really got peoples' attention. It capitalized on this gawker tendency we have towards something we know we shouldn't really be watching but can't look away either. Some people, perhaps the family of the man killed, might be angry with the way their loved one is all over the media when they just want to be out of the spotlight and grieve privately. But here's where we media outlets make the argument that if it wasn't for the video, the community wouldn't have been in such an uproar and this issue of beatings of the homeless wouldn't be out there in the spotlight.
We have to ask - is this loss of privacy for a few worth the knowledge it brought to the many? I think so. The thing about these beatings was- they were homeless men. Not housewives. not senators. people on the fringe of society, who we only think about when they ask us for change or during the holidays. Without that video, the beatings would be sooner forgotten from our minds.
Actually my bigger question is about something else entirely- with the power to find news you want to know about, being able to select it and download it off the Internet, when you want it- what does this access and power mean for us? I look to Google, who is steadily making available any information a person could possibly want, anywhere in the world. Google doesn't really create that information or analysis, but provides a better way to get it to the people who want it. Now there's a lot of overlap in information gathering we in the media do, and forgetting of work that has been done in the past, and redundant replication of stories. Will Google or the internet of the future join all our collective knowledge so we can advance faster in all areas of human endeavor?
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