Asides from those videoed attacks, we do generally like to film ourselves and film others, and show it to a third party. There is little to complain about here; for the majority this practice is cheery enough - traditional home video content, or whatever creative filmmaking you choose to do, with the opportunity to show it to the Internet-using world. That acknowledged, other videos are clearly not so positive, and should be considered equally as abhorrent as top down surveillance. Some camera wielders film people because they think they look funny (how they talk, act, dress, or - in more ignorant cases - because they have tics or mental disorders). They then upload the footage to the Internet with a ‘look at this idiot’ angle suggested in the title and tagging. Sure enough, a lot (but rarely all) of the viewers that comment will agree that the person must be an idiot, LOL etc.
A few years ago an acquaintance showed me a video on his phone. It showed an old man threatening him, and his mid-teen friends, with a raised walking cane. By carefully turning on the camera phone only after they’d stopped taunting him, the group had produced a video that was perfect for a paying newspaper - a mad old guy who hates and hits kids. Charming…terrifying…I thought then. I fully expect phones with CGI rendering capabilities to be putting my generation behind bars by the time we reach pensionable age, miscarriages of justice abounding as throngs of vindictive jokers conjure up robbery, assault and paedophile video evidence out of thin air.
For more video evidence we have Mary cat-meets-wheelie-bin Bale. Who has done something that understandably upsets people (smothering news of triumph, tragedy and endeavour in the rest of the world with a story that should have gone no further than the Coventry Telegraph).
What has happened to Mrs Bale is that she has had CCTV footage and descriptions of her actions posted on the Internet by the owners of the cat, apparently for practical identification rather than vengeance. This allowed the producers and consumers of the Internet to see it, and then of course the rest of the media furthered the story's passage. A large audience has thus viewed and judged Mrs Bales' actions, and a noticeable and unadvisedly vocal minority have commented on them - and on her very existence - in all-talk expletives. For those in agreement and local enough, they can tell Mary Bale what they think directly, or show her what they think.
ARBITRARY, random, one of them. These bullshit people are mad at a woman who, very visibly, offered a lesser example of the sort of behaviour that the vast minority in every community get up to almost invisibly - from disturbances to vandalism to manslaughter. Perhaps the reaction to her comes from hitherto suppressed rage at all the anonymous, uncaught and un-shamed local terrors people are aware of: the nocturnal defecators, grave vandals and animal torturers. For my local area, there was the person or persons who took cats off the street, allowed a couple of days for concerned owners to put up missing posters, and then returned the sometimes mutilated bodies of pets to the place of snatching, for either the owners or their friends and neighbours to find.
Since being threatened Mary Bale has had police protection. If anything happens to her then it is arbitrary and hypocrisy. It’s lashing out at what we can see, and only when it’s convenient for us to look, irrespective of the greater and lesser things that might be out there - things we can’t be bothered to look at outside of YouTube or myface. We are apparently mad at Mrs Bale because for some reason she, momentarily or otherwise, decided to be asinine or malicious toward a cat and drop it in a bin. If somebody attacks Mary Bale or her property in reaction then they will have repeated the behaviour that we are condemning her for.
We are Big Brother, and as an only child I’m both appalled and intrigued by that. I don’t mind that our Big Brother comments have trouble with spelling and grammar (For one, people seem to confuse spelling/grammatical errors with typos, citing all three as examples of mental retardation online. For another, people in glass houses…); I object to the discriminatory, the sexist, ageist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic (or at least heterosexist) thoughts and remarks that can accompany our Big Brother comments. More than that, I dislike where Big Brotherliness tends to take our interest. It seems easier to turn a slanging match with the lady down the street into a public shaming than to round our Big Brotherly gaze on troubled communities or countries – what might start to happen if the gangs who stab were caught on CCTV, uploaded for Facebook rage and YouTube culprit recognition, and finally mass media repulsion?
One good thing about the Mary Bale story, though, was that it got Virginia Ironside to admit to having fantasies of attacking elderly gentlemen in the Daily Mail this morning:
I've occasionally had strange and unwelcome thoughts which seem to come from nowhere, though I don't like admitting to them. For example, I might see an old man coming down the street on crutches and suddenly a thought comes into my mind: 'What if I kicked away his crutches?'The Daily Express crusade, Respect for the Elderly would have you for breakfast, madam.
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