Live Stream your Live Violence
Social Media: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Janet Kuypers
started 2/26/18, edited 2/2/18 and 3/7/18
For years I have tried to use the Internet and the many electronic gadgets to try to share literature with people. When I ran “the Café Gallery” Chicago open mic, I video-recorded open mics and poetry features for not only YouTube video but also for weekly podcasts, and in the last year of my hosting that open mic I used Instagram (even though I didn’t even have a smart phone at the time; I had to borrow my husband’s phone to do it) to photograph people reading poetry at the open mic. This year, I’ve even started photographing images with poetry and hash tagging it like mad on Instagram.
When Facebook started showing off their live stream feature, I thought this was perfect for “going live” at my Austin installment of “The Poetry Bomb” (an idea that started in Chicago to find a public place to read poetry — where you normally wouldn’t expect to hear poetry — held annually on the last Sunday of April at 3:30 in the afternoon), where I read poetry at the Graffiti Wall in Austin for a live Facebook video stream. I even read a poem for a poetry open mic I was unable to attend (so I read the poem live in my car during the “Poetry Aloud” open mic).
How “cutting edge” of me, reading poetry in a live Facebook video stream.
But then I read of how in Chicago men (I should say boys, they were all under 21) gang-raped a woman, and then chose to live stream it on Facebook. And then I read of how a 37-year old Cleveland man shot a 74-year old man in a live Facebook stream too.
Well, I guess I’m not all that cutting edge.
I know I was a late-bloomer to even get a smart phone, but even before then I tried to get the poetry word out on different forms of social media, from Pinterest to Instagram to Tumblr to Google+ — I even created a separate twitter account (jkpoetryvine) to post vine videos of my reading haiku poems. When I ran that Chicago poetry open mic, I would read short poems from different authors in the current newly-released issues of cc&d magazine, so the authors could have their writing out in different forms. And sure, it may seem strange to devote poetry to so many different social media forms, but people loved it. I thought that if I wanted to get the word out about poetry, then I would use any electronic avenue I could.
I suppose I understand how killers may seek attention for the violent acts they commit — that’s nothing new. I suppose it just didn’t occur to me that when these social media outlets (like Facebook live stream), who are all about wanting to give their patrons more avenues to show themselves off, would be a lure for violent offenders and killers as well.
This means that with the advance of technology, the advance of criminals having their voice heard has also grown.
Now think about it: we all have to admit that when there is a car accident on the road you have to drive past, we all want to look to potentially see any gory details. We all have this blood-lust, even if we claim to not be violent people. I’m a vegetarian, I’m morally against the death of animals (which you would imagine makes me against the death of people), but I, like most everyone else, likes the idea of watching if something bad happened. Maybe this is how reality TV can be so popular, to hope for witnessing the destruction of a group of people in real time.
We don’t want to think about it, and we don’t want to believe it, but face it: this is the dark side of allowing freedom of expression in the Internet age. These same companies that stress an open forum (which also removes any concept of privacy) allow us to be able to send tweets, or make Facebook posts, or post pictures or videos in Instagram or Pinterest or Google+. But if I can use all these forms of social media to spread the word about literature, we have to also assume that this can be a forum for potential killers to show off their future “feats” as well.
I know Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s Chief Executive) even said to developers in a conference call that “we have a lot more work to do here”, but there is the question. Where do you draw the line between the people’s freedom — and security? And as I said before, I didn’t even have a cell phone until 2015, but even without the cell phone I was using Instagram and other social media you were supposed to only use with a cell phone. The first web site I had for cc&d was not even in aol, but in eworld (a Mac company that went down by 1996). I started my schooling in computer science engineering at the University of Illinois (the third best school in the country in the field; the University that heralded the inception of the Internet as we know it), so I apparently love getting in on the ground floor of computer technology — and apparently I also love my social media enough to want to have access to it before I was supposed to be even capable of having access to it.
But I am also acutely aware that all of these freedoms and forms of social media that companies have given us (“social” media that allows us to not deal with people on a one-to-one basis), all of these things wouldn’t exist if I lived in any country other than the United States. Translation: social media outlets like this probably wouldn’t have been created by someone in a Commuict country, even if these social media platforms are all about sharing with others anyway...
And no, I’m not going to make this a “God bless the U.S.A.” tirade and chant “U.S.A., U.S.A...”, but I am going to make one thing perfectly clear. I have heard many people complain about problems with this government (though their complaints are usually that the government isn’t giving them enough, when the only way you get anything through the government is through taxpayer money — like everything else the government does, from not building and repairing roads and bridges to funding our military to paying the many, many people who have made lifetime careers out of working in the federal government, which was never the intention of the founding fathers).
Sorry, I’m getting on a tangent with my rant again — It’s been a while since I’ve written an editorial, so I might emotionally go over the top. So okay, let me get back on topic...
I have heard many people complain about this government (often times that the Government is too involved in our lives), and at the same time I have heard many people complain about gun violence — in our schools, in our homes, in our offices. And these same people who complain about our government then want the government to do something to save them from the gun violence that exists in our country.
And I promise, I’m the first person to say that shooting in our schools is wrong. And I am MORE than the first person to say to using social media platforms like Facebook live stream to publicly “share” your violence in real time is the most heinous thing a person can do. But I also have to look at the big picture when it comes to these topics. Trying to dis-assemble parts of our Constitution (which we cannot do anyway) is probably the worst thing we can do for the foundations of our country. When we start to unravel the things that this country was founded on, we unravel the things that make us great.
And you might be thinking, what’s so great about us? Like out healthcare system, it’s —
I can stop you right there already. I know people who live in Canada, and they try to use U.S. healthcare, because they have found that waiting for services takes so long that it’s useless (like waiting 8 months for the Appendectomy you need, for instance). And that’s not even bringing up that leaders of European countries travel to the U.S. for their own medical surgery. And sure, if you think it’s too expensive to get the high-end medications you claim to need, you might be right — but back in the day (like when Medicaid first was formed) people’s life expectancy was MUCH shorter, and people didn’t expect that a doctor had a medication or a surgery that could cure you, from say, cancer, or a hear condition.
I know I’m going off on tangents here, but the thing is, they all relate. We have struck a strange balance in giving us liberty in this country. Without this balance, I am positive that we would never have reached the medical achievements, or the technological achievements, that we have now. And in this insane historical balancing act that this government has made for decades to allow this, we have achieved so many more freedoms that we could imagine even a decade or two ago. If we pull the strings on what has made this country work, just to suit our needs for the most recent shooting we’ve seen on the boob tube or on the tablet, then we are giving up our freedoms for more security.
Wow, that’s sounding like something I’ve heard before... Maybe it was Ben Franklin, who is quoted with “They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Maybe that’s what I get, relying on what founding fathers and the people who helped found this country said about keeping liberty. Because as awful as this sounds, maybe we have to be prepared for these seemingly random acts of violence that happen on a small portion of our population, just to keep what liberties we have.
—Janet Kuypers
Editor in Chief
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