They’ll end up in the same part of our brain that stores information about #Kony2012. Imagine that happening to you, and ask if you feel more humanised, or that you’ve been treated with dignity. And social media being what it is, people who are upset and outraged today will have forgotten those faces by next week. ![]() When these images are placed in the endless, torrential stream of social media, they just become one more image among millions of images, and end up even more faceless than they were before. I don’t feel the weight of their humanity any more for having seen their corpses. I don’t know where they thought they were going. I don’t know what they were running from. So, while it may be a bit extreme to shove pictures of dead kids in someone’s face, at least you’re helping them to understand that we’re talking about human beings, right?īut it doesn’t work like that. I’ve seen the pictures and I still don’t know anything about these people. ![]() The right-wing press like to use dehumanising terms “migrant” and “asylum seeker” to distract from the fact that we’re talking about people. One argument for sharing these pictures is that it provides a human face to an ongoing tragedy. Which leads to the second point…Ģ) The photos don’t humanise people, they dehumanise them I think that’s our duty of care to the dead. I try to show respect even to those old photos. I find it very hard to look at, say, pictures of mass graves from the Holocaust, because I am aware that every single head and torso and twisted limb was a real person, someone who had a name, someone who was just like me. Even to look at the photo is to become involved to a degree. To photograph a dead body, and then to distribute that phtograph, is to take on some responsibility for the handling of that body. We respect the dead, because we hope that the hands that carry us to our rest will do so gently and with dignity. The vulnerability of a human corpse is always deeply moving, partly because we can sense all that’s now lost, and partly because we know that we’ll end up dead like that too some day. It’s a vessel that once contained thoughts, knowledge, emotions, memories, a body that was cuddled when it was a baby, that loved and was loved, that bled and sneezed and farted and sang and cried. ![]() We’re not very good at agreeing on how we should treat the living, but I think most people understand that the dead deserve a certain amount of respect.Ī human body more than just a piece of meat. Let me outline the main reasons I have for objecting, and see what you think: Yet I understand why people do it, and I agree with them on the particular issues. So why is it wrong? That touches on a lot of other issues, such as the nature of political debate, social media, and how we see people from outside our culture. I think it’s wrong to share these images. Pictures of dead or horribly mutilated animals are also relatively common. They were shared by a few people on Facebook, and it’s not the first time that I’ve seen pictures of dead kids shared in order to underline a political point. The images in question are of the bodies of Syrian refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean. I’m back on Facebook less than 24 hours and already I’m asking people to stop sharing images of dead children, please.
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