My Lai Massacre, Vietnam, 1971 Photo WIkileaks Commons / Library of Congress
Vietnam was called “The Livingroom War”.
That’s because it was the first war in US history that came along with live television coverage.
For the first time, Americans could watch the progress or the war, daily, from their homes. Most of it largely uncensored.
What they saw shocked them.
Up until Vietnam, warfare had been carried out in private. It was always bloody, always ugly, always shocking. But the images were kept far from the folk at home.
Those images that were allowed to percolate out into the public space were generally carefully censored and carefully controlled.
But not in Vietnam.
One must wonder at what the impact of television might have been on the long, pointless and seemingly endless mechanized slaughter that trench warfare in the First World War was. Would the US have been so quicky to send troops to the front? Would the German and British and French and Russian public have risen up and demanded an end to such pointless slaughter?
We can only guess.
What we do know is that live and filmed images from Vietnam, night after night, year after year, had an enormous impact on the American public, giving rise to an antiwar movement in this country that had never been seen before, (and has never been seen again). We stil lhave the images from Iraq and Afghanistan, (though tye are largely sanitized through the expendience of ’embedding), and of course, without a draft, they become more ancilliary entertainment than a real threat to anyone approaching the age of 18 or their families.
But that technology of ‘television’ (how archaic the term begins to sound) was nothing compared to the instant images and soon to come live streaming video that the Internet and the digital age offer. In the Vietnam War, getting cameras, and it was mostly film cameras, to the battle, processing the images, transmitting them via satellite was complex and expensive. And there were precious few cameras on the ground at all.
Today, all that has changed.
Every smart phone in the world, (and there are now 1.4 billion of them, soon to be 3 billion) is also a mini-TV broadcasting node. A complete studio with which the owner may record photos and videos and upload at will – and for the most sophisticated (and those with good connecdtions) even live stream events as they happen.
Even now, we find ourselves inundated with endless images of violence – Gaza, Ukraine, ISIS, LIberia.. and it’s only the very beginning.
There’s a general sense in the world that things are falling apart. That the world is spinning out of control. That the future looks far worse than the past,
This may be true.
It may also simply be that we are seeing the world as it is, for the first time
Unmediated.
And maybe that is a more depressing picture than we ever thought it might be.
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2014
