Time magazine recently bestowed its “Person of the Year” honour on “You.” Yes, you. This distinction seems to indicate that the ordinary Joe Bloggs has become empowered. We can all now create and contribute to the sharing of information; we are all “citizen journalists.” But does this mean that we have reached a new height of civilisation?
The idea behind Time’s decision is that the cosmic compendium of knowledge available through new technology allows the many to wrest power from the few. All this because the internet (apparently) universalizes access to 98 per cent of knowledge, because emails and mobile phones allow instant communication that used to be the preserve of the military, because blogs allow anybody to write anything and disseminate it worldwide, and because YouTube has turned us all into James Cameron.
The mobile phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution that a ‘member of the public’ posted online is a testament to the way news broadcasting is blindly following reality television. Ordinary people are being accorded the same respect as prolific artists. These rapid changes in terms of media use should lead us to reflect, like Cameron did in The Terminator, on the relationship between technology and mankind.
It’s all a con. Surely, the restricted two per cent of knowledge-whatever that may be-is where the real power lies. And yes, we write blogs, but who reads them? We can text our 10-cent-opinion to TV news polls, but who asked you (yes, you) about Afghanistan, Iraq, or Saddam’s execution? This supposed enthroning of ordinary people is more enslavement than empowerment for us consumers in the West. One Canadian’s Christmas sweater is another Honduran’s sweatshop labour. It is fallacious to say that technological progress will redeem mankind.
The world recently witnessed the chaotic and tawdry hanging of Saddam, and a great deal was made of this macabre affair. One journalist compared it to the execution of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was put to death in December 43 BC. Cicero spent time in exile for putting Roman citizens to death without trial (or, as Cicero himself might have put it, for taking the necessary steps against a dangerous cell of terrorists: it was a “homeland security” problem). After his execution, his head and hands were cut off and put on display on the speaker’s platform in the Forum, these particular parts symbolizing Cicero’s two key weapons: his ability to write and to speak with devastating effect.
The public degradation of Cicero’s corpse is not something we would tolerate today, but, importantly, it was not accompanied by the self-righteous double standards that have greeted the public execution of Saddam and the worldwide dissemination of the footage. Thanks to the covert cameraman, Saddam’s has undoubtedly become the best-attended public execution in history.
We take it for granted that Roman behaviour was sadistic, and beyond our own scale of values. But it is certainly worth asking how we can draw the line between us and the Romans, and how confidently we can maintain that distinction. Rather than being at the peak of our human cultural achievement then, we have turned backwards, as the footage of Saddam’s execution shows.
Time magazine is thoughtlessly complicit in the notion that technological progress will civilize us. “Person of the Year,” perhaps, but we’ve made no life-enhancing difference thanks to technology.
