A soldier serving in Afghanistan was killed while Skyping with his wife. (We don’t know whether he was shot or died of some other cause.) How will your death be live-streamed?
Death by Skype
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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The point?
I am curious. How did Comrade Rall communicate from Afghanistan during his latest sojourn?
Skype is a cheap way to telephone (free if the person you’re calling also has Skype).
Skype is NOT like posting to Twitter or YouTube.
Capt. Clark’s demise does not seem unlike some soldier dropping dead while using a normal telephone.
I can see that it is relevant to our current world to do a cartoon about the people who DO post their deaths to Twitter and YouTube, but I don’t see the connection to a soldier’s dying during a private conversation on Skype.
So good cartoon, but better if Comrade Rall had omitted the soldier who died while talking to his wife using Skype.
We have so much non-news nowadays – How about a cartoon without any real point?…
There is no afterlife.
I think the point — Ted can always chime in if I’m wrong — is that people are so busy “communicating” through all these different forms of technology that they are not paying attention to the real world around them. Whether it’s a soldier who got killed while Skyping (that is, not paying attention to his surroundings in a hostile environment) or some fool walking into traffic while CrackBerrying, people are hooked on their little boxes of lights. I’ve noticed an uptick in this whole “going out with a make-sure-everyone-is-paying-attention-to-me bang” and how it’s usually glossed over as being “empowering” rather than the only possible outcome of a society in which people think every glass of water they drink deserves a blog post, a tweet, a facebook post, a YouTube video, etc.
Of course, I’m an old fart. I remember when people made friends with their neighbors and co-workers, not people 3,000 miles away via chat groups and such.