A death on the Internet and the gift of time

Last week, the New York Times reported that Océane, a young French woman, narrated and filmed her death by throwing herself under a train. The entire episode was posted on Periscope, a live-streaming app owned by Twitter. Excerpts were run later on YouTube.

Also according to the Times, last month two French teens assaulted a 24-year-old drunk in Paris and later posted – again on Periscope – images of them laughing and bragging about the assault. And in Ohio, a 17-year-old-girl filmed an alleged rape committed on a girlfriend and not only did not intervene but filmed the event and streamed a video of it, too, on Periscope.

Other than being shocked and outraged, what are we to make of these disturbing events?

Well, Thomas Husson, a Paris-based technologist at Forrester Research, says this (also quoted in the Times): “We now live in a dictatorship of real time.” By which he meant largely that a world in which everything is broadcast instantly, without perspective, is changing the very nature of what we know and how we know it.

We now live in a dictatorship of real time?

Forgive me. I’m 77. I was brought up in a different age, one when we paused before saying something menacing and where newspapers ran their printing presses once a day. This necessary delay often allowed time for reporters to reflect before writing their stories, enabled a considered response to events, allowed editors to mull the day’s happenings before setting them before the public.

But today’s technology allows us – and seemingly compels many of us – to post simultaneously and in real time. And as a result everything is different.

Everything.

Facebook, the current king of social media, is now the world’s largest source for news. Republicans know this; that’s why they are so upset with the organization over alleged biases against conservative viewpoints in its “Trending” news section.

Even worse, a substantial number of people say their get their news entirely from 140-character posts – characters – on Twitter. Again, forgive me. That makes me worry.

A friend in Western Michigan, one of the most able people I know, thinks that ever since cell phones became ubiquitous, the country has become ungovernable. It’s now possible to generate a flash mob by means of a Twitter post, quickly mobilizing a thundering herd with 140 characters. A consciously false posting generates instant reaction before it can be corrected. Anybody with a computer is now a publisher, while, sadly, nobody’s an editor.

Policy-makers, let alone politicians, are now allowed no space for reflection before being obliged by an increasingly stringent daily news cycle into saying something – maybe “popping off” is a more accurate expression. A question answered off the cuff in a press conference is moved around the world at lightning speed, setting off God only knows what kinds of unanticipated responses.

The result is an acceleration of events that imposes dimly perceived but very important changes in the way we think. The best parallel I can draw is to point to the ways climate change threatens animals which cannot adapt quickly enough to survive by the ordinary, slow processes of evolution.

And because events are more and more a case of stimulus followed almost immediately by response, our society’s mechanisms for coping with change are increasingly dated and ineffective.

Well before the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination was settled, people in the Bernie Sanders campaign were quoted on social media as interested in creating separate organizations designed to attack Donald Trump from both the left and the right, avoiding entirely any relationship with the Democratic Party.

In a nation that revels uneasily in its diversity, social organizations like political parties which cluster people together are the bedrock of our national unity, together with churches and voluntary groups like bowling leagues and PTA’s.

Lose these, and the alternative is an increasingly splintered society in which the mirror of our togetherness is jagged and cracked.

Sure, what’s happening today is freedom of speech and a monument to diversity of thought and action – coupled with the relentless advance of technology. But that, in turn, may result in an increasingly evident, powerful and worrisome dictatorship of real time.