Searching for War on Youtube

Viral content has essentially drowned within itself. It used to signify a particular image or video that represented a particular cultural marker. It was impossible to imitate. Part of the phenomenon’s allure came from the fact that no knew why exactly it was a phenomenon.

Then, over time, more content started to become viral. Sites like Reddit provided an easy medium to view all of the available viral content at any given time. Soon memes allowed for the personalization of viral content. And then came Buzzfeed, which turned viral content into an incredibly successful business model.

At this point, viral content changes every day. Each piece of content simply represents a wave in the ocean of the internet, crashing onto the shore one day before the tide slides it back into virtual oblivion.

Viral content is an endless list of funny gifs and cat videos, strange images and witty lists, but sometimes it can be much more significant.

A video surfaced yesterday that, by all the traditional metrics, has gone viral. People shared it on Facebook. It hit the front page of Reddit. And it played more than three million times in the first twenty-four hours. It also received coverage on the major news networks.

The video shows a plane crash at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Like many of the similar videos that depict such destruction, it is mesmerizing, terrifying, and hauntingly surreal.

A plane ascends and then it tips on its side. And then it falls. Smoothly and silently and almost slowly, it falls. You think of a word to describe it and you want to say a word like “gliding” or “controlled” but both seem terribly wrong.

And then the ground absorbs it and it disappears. No sound, just an expanding fireball and a plume of smoke and seven people killed.

It almost reminds you of a movie (the Atlantic Wire compared it to sequences in The Dark Knight Rises and Flight) but it not quite. It may be the lack of sound or the fact it was shot on the dashboard cam. It may just be the knowledge that it is real.

But even then it does not quite seem real. We comprehend the visual destruction and the death and we tell ourselves that it is real. But it is still a video that went viral on the internet and it still does not seem completely real.

It is a continuing testament to the power of the internet in an age when the internet can start revolutions. But it should also be a caution about the viral spread of a human tragedy.

The fact is that the video, while a stark reminder about the dangers of flight, represents nothing more than a brief diversion for the majority of viewers. It is a spectacle, not a memorial. It gives people a virtual sense of reality’s dangers while they remain safe from the actual fear of those dangers.

Of course, the idea of human tragedy as a spectacle is nothing new, even for the internet. The proliferation of helmet cameras in Afghanistan and Iraq has created extensive footage of firefights on sites like Youtube. Quite a few have gone viral, with millions of views each. One channel has specifically documented firefights. In five years, it has had more than 132 million views.

Like all technological phenomena, the proliferation of these videos has both negative and positive consequences. In the future, it will provide an immense and unprecedented archival record for historians. It also allows civilians to appreciate the dangers and sacrifices of being a soldier in a completely new way.

But it also transforms war into another form of entertainment media, one regularly watched and consumed by viewers entranced by these video game-like sequences. And it also lends to a glamorization of war that denies its human elements for one of visual spectacle.

At the same time, the internet has dramatically accelerated the proliferation of these videos to a mass audience. The fact that these videos can go viral means that the people can die one day and their deaths can go viral on the internet, seen by millions, by the time their families find out.

This gets at the true problem of tragic videos in the land of viral content. As observers, the millions who have seen the video will never mourn for those who died except in the most abstract sense. They will not comprehend the grief that those families are experiencing while watching the very document and symbol of that grief.

And tomorrow will come and another video will emerge and the pain of their loss will simply slide out to sea like all of the other lost content on the internet.

Raul Quintana ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. He is studying abroad at the University of Oxford this semester. His column appears on alternate Fridays.