Pics or It Didn't Happen: The New Crisis of Connected Cameras
In days or weeks, when the United States again drops bombs on the Islamic State, it will commence its first war shaped and driven by networked photography—the twinned phenomena of ubiquitous, Internet-connected cameras to take pictures and screens to view them. The gruesome video of ISIS militants executing U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff seems to have upended American public opinion, and now even almost-isolationist politicians have embraced intervention abroad.
On August 19, ISIS posted a video of journalist James Foley’s murder to YouTube. Links to the entire video of Foley’s murder spread though Twitter in minutes. Even now, though YouTube quickly took the video down, though institutional journalists quickly stopped sharing it, even though Twitter has systematically suspended accounts sharing images of Foley’s death, the video remains available.
And it almost didn’t matter, by then. Stills from the Foley execution video had appeared on newspapers, websites, and TV. They popped up on Facebook feeds. Americans saw his face, his shaved head. They learned of the Islamic State’s first American victim.
The news—the images—penetrated the dense, complex U.S. media sphere. According to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll completed earlier this week, 94 percent of Americans followed at least some coverage of the executions. Fifty-nine percent said they had sought out “a lot” of coverage of the killings.
And public opinion began to
