(19:30)

     Susan Sontag:  “Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war -- thanks to television -- have devolved into a nightly banality.  Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react.  Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb.  So runs the familiar diagnosis. 

     “But what is really being asked for here?  That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week?  More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an ‘ecology of images’?  There isn’t going to be an ecology of images.  No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock.  And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.”

                  from:  Regarding the Pain of Others,  2003

     I agree with Susan Sontag, but simple agreement is not enough here.  For our nightly banality is indeed devolving.  And our abilities for compassion and indignation are being stretched to the point of rupture.  Yet, we have not lost our capacity to critically react. 

    Yes, horrors will never abate, but we must examine and question our exploitative illustration of these horrors, and why we so readily buy and sell (consume and produce) them all.

     Sontag understands that the notion of an ecology of images is simplistic and should not necessarily equate to any narrow notion of a ‘Committee of Guardians’.  But there can still be other effective means for reacting to our nightly banalities.  (C)ritical media ethnography is but one tactical counter-method towards better understanding.

    “Excruciations of war” do indeed flood our media, but these images are neither inevitable or happenstance.  Nor are they necessarily “true”.  Rather, our nightly banalities are purposely constructed, conditioned and disseminated by anonymous  mediamongering producers.  And so, these banalities must in turn be purposely (ie., actively not passively) received, rebuffed, and refunctioned by accountable media consumers.  And our findings should be played back to mediamongers.   

    Thus, maybe “what is being asked for here” -- to which I reply in this video here of the media-blood-lust surrounding Muammar Gaddafi’s capture-- is to consider that death today is no longer simply the last final breath, rather DEATH is the last possible photograph.  With the difference between these two straddling that blurry lust-line between watching and whipping...between the watched and the whipped.  We must tell this story back to the mongers who profited from their original pornography.