Death in the Browser Tab – NYTimes.com

Death in the Browser Tab

Footage of death brings the event uncannily close, but this can be both too much and not enough.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/death-in-the-browser-tab.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life — at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park — you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it.