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Happy
slapping: transatlantic contagion or home-grown, mass-mediated
nihilism?
Robert Saunders
Origin: Static Issue 01
Content: PDF
“The British press is abuzz with reports
of a disturbing phenomenon sweeping through English youth culture:
happy-slapping. It has now en vogue among certain segments of
the youth to physically attack unsuspecting victims and record
the event on a mobile phone. Video of the event is then posted
in cyberspace or forwarded to others as “proof” of
the attack, which may be as innocuous as a playground slap to
as nefarious as rape, ...”
download PDF
Contributor:
Robert A. Saunders is an Assistant Professor in
the Political Science department at Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey at Newark. He teaches courses on Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union, global Islam, and mass media. His
research interests include transnational identity, politics in
cyberspace, and national minorities. He has also taught at Wagner
College, Monmouth University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University.
He received his PhD in Global Affairs from the Center for Global
Change and Governance at Rutgers University in 2005. Recent publications
include “A Marooned Diaspora: Ethnic Russians in the Near
Abroad and Their Impact on Russia’s Foreign Policy and Domestic
Politics” in International Migration and the Globalization
of Domestic Politics (Routledge, 2005).
Response:
The Available Society
The 'society' of journalists, teachers, concerned
parents, etc is attempting to use happy slapping to resist the
tide of technological change, so Robert Saunders argues in his
thoughtful and relevant article. He then holds up a mirror to
that society and points to the erosion of "parents, the local
community, and the church" as 'explainers' of the world. Their
tide of blue faced anger is a worthy target of deflected blame,
but I think Saunders over compensates. Or rather, I would argue
that society is indeed causal or if you prefer, 'to blame' for
the excesses of technology, but not as an eroder of morals and
unhinger of teenagers. 'Society' got us here by embedding its
values in the technology we order our life by. Technology does
change us, but not in Marshall McLuhan's strictly deterministic
sense of "the medium is the message." Consider the technology
of the cinema, initially we adapted to it -- apart from those
frightened viewers fleeing the sight of an oncoming train. In
time however it has changed our understanding of the world with
its concepts of scenes, viewpoints and cuts. The camera phone
has not yet restructured our shared imaginaries in such a profound
way but its effects are rapidly diffusing into the culture, as
evidenced by happy slapping. To trace the root of all this I'd
look beyond the collapse of youth morality or the pernicious effects
of this particular embodiment of technology and look instead to
technology itself. Heidegger, in his polemical essay, "On the
question concerning technology" identified technology as having
an essence that he termed 'Gestell' or 'en-framing.' This is an
ordering of all things and a kind of promise of their mutability
and availability. My own view is that the essence of digital communications
technology is 'availability' in particular, but not always with
the negative inflections of Heidegger's Gestell. This essence
stretches back to that pre digital instantaneous network, the
telegraph. The telegraph gave traders knowledge of commodity prices
across continents and allowed them to marshal these commodities
at a distance. Moving to the near present, email initially seemed
like little more than a speed increase on post or fax but it is
far more -- it promises the availability of anyone in public life
be they journalists, customer service agents or prime ministers.
Go to any gig, protest or sports event and you'll see the camera
phone making these events available to others through relay of
images and postings on bulletin boards and blogs. After the London
bombings of July 7th blogs were filled with grainy digital images
promising instantaneous availability. Most, however, were not
taken at the bomb sites, but were instead photos of Sky News.
The desire for availability had fulfilled Marshall McLuhan's dictum
that "the content of new media is old media" although when the
same images appeared in the following days newspaper the dictum
was reversed. So much for McLuhan's form of technological determinism.
I would argue that this desire for availability is a social or
cultural value that then shapes the direction of technology. If
we privileged privacy or security in our culture, the constellation
of technical systems (Internet, digital camera, digital mobile
networks, etc.) that make happy slapping possible would have been
deflected in quite different directions. So society is to blame,
but for embedding its cultural values in technology and not for
failing to instill morals in its youth. In passing, I thought
of Peter Ackroyd who tells how 16th Century Londoners feared roving
gangs of apprentice butchers. Hysteria about wayward youth is
ageless.
Luke
Smith
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