Jo Angami
Kohima
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Asks a familiar thought experiment. Acoustics and Philosophy have differing answers. There is no consensus, hallmarks of a valuable thought experiment.
Today, I would like to ask a variant of the same, ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and only one person was there to see it and failed to livestream it, did it even happen?’ The respectable folks at 4chan and Reddit opine in the negative, ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’. While the rest of the folks at large may argue otherwise. Therefore, as in all such cases of contention, it is helpful to turn to examples.
The most glaring, in the light of recent events is of course, the disaster in Nepal. Within hours of the event, we had access to more than five videos of each location shot at different angles and elevation. While they had alerted the world about the predicament as soon as possible, there have been speculations that some may have died livestreaming. Some videos from survivors show them moving to safety only just seconds before the unthinkable could have happened. Researchers have named the phenomenon ‘Screen Paralysis’, wherein fliming and thus, viewing an event through a screen and being surrounded by people who are doing the same detaches one from the urgency of the event, turns them into spectators and observers, no different than someone watching the same in the safety of their home. In severe cases, the desire to film possible viral content also overrides the instinct for survival.
It seems unthinkable for one to completely disregard their safety and wellbeing in this manner, to go on some kind of unfortunate digital autopilot but what is a person but the sum of all their daily actions? Are we not being primed to do the same?
To take a step back, let us look at the very desire for documentation, this desire to leave a sign of existence behind, to say ‘I was here and I lived in this moment in time’. Whether it be the prehistoric man pressing his palm onto the wall of the caves along the Pinturas, the pharaohs of Egypt and their massive pyramids or a woman under a bunker in a war torn country making a daily diary entry in the face of erasure. It is all at once claiming a stake in space and time and a protest against the ravages of nature, human violence and the passage of time on this fleeting life. Memento Mori and Memento Vivere intertwine in reminder. Call it Symbolic immortality or Erik Erikson’s Generativity. It is all, I suppose, grasping at straws at the end of the day because more than dying, we desperately fear dying and being forgotten. That all of this was for nought.
With that in mind, it makes sense that the desire, being part of our psyche, now finds full validation in our day and age. It finally has a concrete space to place itself outside of time. The internet is, as they say, forever. But is this form of documentation the same in spirit as those our ancestors used? Building a monument or writing about falling out of love in a small nondescript diary no one will ever see, these may have more in common than the medium we use to immortalise ourselves today. It is, I claim, ephemerance - permanence that is completely ephemeral. The one distinguishing and highly ironic aspect of our media.
Let us begin by observing the decisions we as a society make on a daily basis when it comes to our relationship with memory and media. Aside from the well studied and well experienced phenomenon of the ‘audience driven identity’ at the individual level, what is particularly interesting here is the very same but at the collective level. For a simple example, take the case of a simple practice that has been normalised in the span of less than a decade - I refer to the filming of every single Church sermon, Sunday church programme, wedding, birthday celebration, funerals, public punishments and their subsequent uploads to YouTube. Every aspect of community life is preserved and shelved in the archives of the internet. In the same breath, every aspect of it, a piece of entertainment to some stranger on the other side of the planet who has nothing to do with us. We present ourselves as living museums to you.
Let us discuss one instance among these, the filming of the weekly Sunday Service Programme. Take the case of the previous Sunday at the church I am a member of. It was a special Sunday so I concede that the filming of it must have been necessary. The whiplash however, was at the very end of the service when the compere mentioned that the service had been filmed and would be uploaded to the Church’s YouTube channel and his request as we left the premises was to, ‘like, share, and subscribe’. It must have been a small thing, hardly warranting the reaction it got out of me but in that moment, there was this kind of dissociation, this odd feeling of being out of place. This consciousness of being observed, but not by God in His holy house. That the worship had been done not for Him alone. There is also the question of privacy, of events clipped and taken out of context, monetisation and moral aspects of it among many others but that is for another day. Similarly the other instances, when bride and groom are the center of a wedding as well as subjects of a video to be watched and commented on by strangers. Or when youth leaders and vigilantes film videos of public punishments and humiliate petty criminals to be lauded by strangers and met with the approval of a thumbs up a thousand miles away. When YouTube reporters get to crime scenes before law enforcement and run interrogations live or when a widow’s grief over her husband's death becomes part of the never ending stream of content one can like and scroll past. Society turns into a reality show that is never off air, lives where events themselves aren’t ever as real as their digital footprints. Nothing is real unless it is uploaded to the cloud. ‘Hyperreality’ as hypothesised by Jean Baudrillard.
Tell me, how many videos did you watch after you scrolled past the one where the border crossing at Tibet was swallowed by the river?
