Of tragedies & viral videos

Manpriya Singh 

What would you do when you see a building on fire? Or a man about to jump off a cliff? Ordinary human beings with quick reflexes will call emergency services. Not so quick reflexes… may be shout out for help. Anything but not make a video of the event!  Even the dare-devil brave-hearts would cringe at the very least. Shriek. Kneel down. Pray. Pass out.  Give up. Videographing the event figures next in the list!

Is it normal?

Be it the traumatic mowing down of people on the railway track at the recent tragedy in Amritsar or group of students being washed away by floods at Uttrakhand, back in 2013, wherever there is a tragedy, there is a visual record. Good or bad comes later, first, is it normal?  “The feeling to post something not normal by own name on social media overpowers some people. Social media publicity is the key factor at play here,” sums up Dr Vandana Raghuvanshi, psychologist at Mind Wave, Chandigarh. 

Bystander effect

Amreen Sekhon, fifth year PhD student, psychology and clinical psychologist at Apollo Clinic, lends a slightly different perspective. “There are several situations where people instead of lending a helping hand simply capture the event on their smart-phone. This is known as a bystander effect, which is a social phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to the victims when other people are present.”

She adds, “In the modern world, people feel that by recording the event they are acting as social media activists and helping the cause, but instead it’s just a modern day bystander effect. While for others, there is simply lack of empathy.”  

Shares Madurima Tuli, BDS student at Panjab University, “I wouldn’t have known the actual extent of disaster caused by Kerala floods this year had it not been for videos that went viral on the WhatsApp. So after a tragedy has happened, any video made with good intentions is a different story.” The debate is open. The choice is yours. 

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Traumatic events we got to witness… 

• This year, a 14 year old Class IX student jumps to death from the eighth floor of a building in Mumbai. While one neighbor rushed to save her, another recorded the incident, post which of course the video went viral. 
• Seeing parked cars being washed away in floods is one thing. Seeing families in cars or tourists being washed away in floods, quite another. Who doesn’t remember the video of a family at the edge of waterfall that shocked the social media in 2015?