Editors Comments

An earthly addiction to images

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:43

In what turns out to be a misguided move, the alien from Planet Sploynk decides to give TV Earth one more try and tunes in. The alien last tried watching TV Earth on 11 May only to be confused by dazzling images of a royal wedding in England, contrasted with low resolution, grizzly footage denoting the demise of notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden.

Well, the alien has picked a lousy time to give TV Earth another shot. He switches on and is confronted (after being warned that he may find the following pics disturbing) by gory images of the death of an earthling tyrant, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Apart from being bloody and upsetting, the images are again low resolution, captured on cell phone cameras.

The alien, a perfectly moral Sploynkian, ponders whether such images should be shown on TV to a mass audience. On the one hand he wonders, as did earthling academic Professor Tawana Kupe earlier in the week, whether the airing by broadcasters and subsequent avid consumption by viewers of such images lessens earthlings’ humanity. The alien thinks that maybe even tyrants, whatever ghastly deeds they may have committed, should be shown some respect in death. But the alien also understands that the public wants absolute proof of the death of a tyrant. No, the alien cannot make his mind up on this issue, as he sees both points of view.

Then it occurs to the alien that broadcast or not, the images were globally circulated via cell phones and the Internet anyway. Abandoning the TV channel the alien opts for earthling print media instead. He reads an article in The Guardian newspaper about how social media and cell phone cameras have made it impossible for governments to control news of political deaths. The article relates how US secretary of state Hilary Clinton, in the middle of a press conference about the Libyan situation prior to confirmation of Gadaffi’s death, was handed a cell phone with images of the dead tyrant, which were whizzing around the world as she spoke.

In a fit of enough is enough, the alien trashes all earthling media. He tunes back into TV Sploynk, which broadcasts nothing but crisp, clear and unbloody high definiton images. He is grateful that cell phones and the Internet don’t exist on his planet. Even more gratifying to the alien is the fact that Planet Sploynk is tyrant-free.

Joanna Sterkowicz

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