![]() ![]() No scholarly study has focused on Watch People Die (yet). “The notion of who seeks this out repeatedly is something that’s difficult for me to speak to.” “Curiosity is likely to be appeased by viewing this once,” she told me. But what’s there to contemplate after watching an Islamic State militant get blown up by an anti-tank missile? How does watching a girl’s head get shattered by a street sign, the result of trying to take a (nude) selfie out the window of a moving car, provide any sort of service? Moreover, what’s the use in regularly viewing such grisly content?ĭr Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the effects of repeated exposure to traumatic media, doesn’t see any psychological benefits. Sure, the subreddit’s top posts depict deaths that are “very real” insofar as they’re not fake. ![]() We are attempting to provide a service by showcasing this content.”ĭr Saltz calls Watch People Die’s claim to being beneficial “a really debatable point”. The subreddit’s mission is reiterated further down the page: “This community is intended to observe and contemplate the very real reality of death. Its front page announces that it’s not for grossing people out but for “documenting and observing the disturbing reality of death”. ![]() If you’re like most people, though, supporters of Watch People Die would say, you don’t understand what purpose it serves. ![]() How was it any different from shock sites or the now-banned subreddits featuring dead kids and bloody self-harm? If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t have needed to actually watch anything on the subreddit, only to read a sampling of its post titles – “Worker burns alive”, “Prison guard slams inmate to death”, “Man still alive while getting cut open with a machete” – to decide that, yes, clearly it was a transgression. Reddit took Watch People Die offline, as administrators grappled with a potentially damning question: was it a violation of Reddit’s terms of service that prohibit “content that encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence”? The video was titled “Teenager waves bye, then blows head off with shotgun on YouTube Live”, and it continued for an achingly long half-hour after the suicide, showing the boy’s mother finding his body. It grew in relative obscurity until this March, when Motherboard reported that the top post on a popular subreddit was a link to a video of an 18-year-old killing himself – a video that, at the same time, topped Watch People Die. Once a private act with an aura of solemnity, death had become something whose sights and sounds could be freely consumed by millions of people. The number of video-focused shock sites proliferated. The shock-site granddaddy was, a digital house of real-life horrors where you (along with 200,000 other people a day in 2001) went to see the most gruesome content in existence.īy the mid-aughts, anyone with a cellphone could take and share photos and videos of anything, anywhere, at any time. In the 1990s, the ubiquity of digital cameras and dial-up internet yielded the first “shock sites”. It wasn’t (most of the deaths were later revealed to be fake) but it was, truly, the first viral video. The legend of Faces of Death spread via word-of-mouth, as everyone from gore enthusiasts to curious eighth-graders sought out what was purportedly the first movie to depict real people dying on screen. But if our obsession with death has been around as long as us, it’s only in the past few decades that spectatorship of death has grown widespread.Īs is the case of so many things – our inability to focus, our loss of face-to-face intimacy – technology is to blame.įorty years ago, the cult classic film Faces of Death, a 105-minute compilation of killings and autopsies, brought to light our collective desire to see what JG Ballard called “the horrors of the real”. “All humans have sadistic urges, masochistic urges, voyeuristic urges,” said Dr Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill–Cornell School of Medicine. ![]()
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