The sensational story of a man who videotaped a murder and posted it online is a cautionary tale for our times. The back-story of Luka Rocco Magnotta – now the target of an international manhunt – is so improbable as to verge on fiction. The 29-year-old had appeared on a television reality show, worked in gay pornography, and was under investigation by animal rights groups for recording videos of the mutilation of small animals.
When police forces in two Canadian cities were contacted by an American lawyer concerned at what appeared to be authentic online footage of a murder, they responded dismissively and ignored evidence that could have led to Magnotta’s arrest. Only after parts of the victim’s corpse turned up in packages mailed to the headquarters of two of Canada’s main political parties did the police establish a connection between the so-called ‘body parts’ murder case and the video they had ignored.
The tabloid details of the murder and the alleged killer’s lurid biography will likely remain headline news for some time, but more attention ought to be paid to the emergence of a digital culture in which bizarre phenomena – filmed violence, beheadings, mutilation – are not only overlooked or tolerated but actively curated. The Canadian press has reported extensively on the existence of legal websites that host such material and even allow viewers to post videos of their reaction to the footage. The promotion of such unquestionably obscene material has no imaginable legal defence, even in the generous terms of the wide-ranging debate on censorship that emerged in North America in recent years. Yet the existence of such websites, and a casual scepticism or indifference towards them has become commonplace.
What we do online is now a major social, cultural and political question. The emergence of Internet ‘memes’ – ideas that go ‘viral’ in the digital world – now interests academic and policymakers, but much of the current analysis has been so trivial and self-congratulating as to be practically useless. Matt Labash, a senior writer at The Weekly Standard, recently visited the third biennial ‘ROFL Conference‘ on internet memes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the conference’s name comes from the texting acronym for “rolling on the floor laughing”). There he found an amusing collection of misfits and eccentrics who had achieved Internet fame through posting videos of piano-playing cats, cameo roles in advertisements, or television interviews that had, in many cases, inexplicably, caught the public’s imagination. While these characters are harmless in themselves, Labash also noted the Internet’s power to humiliate. He mentions, in passing, the provenance of a phrase “used to mock people as though they have learning disabilities” – created by someone who attached the words “I Can Count to Potato” to an image of a girl with Down Syndrome, “lifted from a support group site for parents whose kids have been diagnosed with Down.”
One of the puzzling qualities of the Internet is that every one of its weaknesses can also prove to be a strength. The video that earned the warlord Joseph Kony global notoriety a few months ago was also a meme, though, arguably, one in the service of a higher objective. Some of the smartest analysts of digital culture also believe that it offers a potential remedy for chronic social ills. In Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal argues that online games can teach children ethical behaviour – learned from heroic models – and supplant the ennui and disconnection which have supposedly undermined the Me Generation. To date, however, much of this valuable attention has been squandered on pirated entertainment, videos of piano-playing cats, celebrity mishaps and other ephemera. Aspects of the new culture have even made us sceptical of reality to the point at which police officers ignore evidence of a real murder because it looks like a hoax.
In The Net Delusion, a trenchant critique of Utopian visions of modern communications technology, Evgeny Morozov writes: “Those of us concerned about the future of democracy around the globe must stop dreaming and face reality: The Internet has provided so many cheap and easily available entertainment fixes … that it has become considerably harder to get people to care about politics at all.” In its original context, Morozov is talking about authoritarian countries, but his book is replete with examples of the Internet’s practically universal power to distract its audience from more consequential matters.
