Is It Wrong that Death is so Accessible to the Public?

I sent this link to Sociological Images, but just in case it doesn’t get posted there I’m copying my email here to hopefully get some of your opinions on the topic:

Good Afternoon,

I thought this related to your recent post about the LAPD exhibit:

I didn’t watch this video and won’t, but I read the post (Perez Hilton) and it sounds like a really disturbing video where a man is killed when he is tased and chokes on something. It makes me sick how easy it is to watch someone die on YouTube. I’m curious to hear what your take is on videos like this one being posted (don’t worry, this video doesn’t start playing when you open the link):

http://perezhilton.com/2010-03-09-porn-actor-killed-in-drug-bust-by-police-taser-watch-it-all-happen

I don’t really know what to think about these types of videos being so accessible. On the one hand, it’s sad to think that people are being entertained by videos of tragic deaths. But I’ve heard it argued that we no longer face death, we separate ourselves from death and use euphemisms to describe it (passed away, no longer with us), so maybe it’s healthy to be exposed to death. I’m not convinced that that’s a good argument for videos like this one being out there for anyone to see.

Curious to hear your thoughts, big fan of your blog!

-Lindsay

What do you think of these types of videos?

Sociological Images (My New Favourite Blog)

I recently discovered this awesome blog, and since I’m really bad at describing things I’ll just copy and paste their description:

Sociological Images: Seeing is Believing is designed to encourage all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination by presenting brief sociological discussions of compelling and timely imagery that spans the breadth of sociological inquiry.

I’m in love with Sociological Images, and it has made me think about the subtext when faced with certain images. Here are a few posts that I’ve enjoyed since I’ve started following this blog:

The Difference Between Male and Female Vegetarians: Self-Sufficiency!

1920 Proposal to Ban Female Drivers

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Social Control of Mothers (this one interested me because there has recently been a bit of debate going on in the Winnipeg Free Press letters to the editor about sterilizing FAS mothers)

Guest Post: An Indigenous Olympics?

I’ve even been sending them things…here’s one I sent in that they posted:

Gender Non-Conformity is a Drag
What struck me as odd was that the comments thread on that post quickly turned to speculations that Shiloh might be transgendered. As if a biological girl would only choose to wear girl’s clothes.

Transgendered or not, Shiloh’s lucky to have parents that are open-minded enough to let her wear what she wants, in spite of the pressures of being in the spotlight.

…

I sent them another link maybe an hour ago and haven’t heard back yet as to whether it will be posted, but I’m going to copy and paste my email into another post, as I’m curious to hear your opinions on the topic.

I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I do!

bing.com, David to google’s Goliath?

I like to have a look at where people come from to get to this blog, and today I noticed that a large proportion of today’s traffic has come from searches on a search engine called bing.com. Weird, I’ve never heard of this search engine before.

 My first reaction was why wouldn’t you just use google?

My second reaction was to google bing.com

So this new search engine is basically Microsoft’s answer to Google. Good luck Microsoft! Google’s a monster but I’ll be interested to see how Bing stacks up. The word “google” has become a part of our vernacular, I wonder if people will be open to replacing that with “bing”.

How do you like bing.com so far?

I tried bing-ing “struck by enlightning” and I didn’t like how it pulled results with enlightEning automatically rather than acting if I’d like to correct it.

I do like how bing puts related searches in the left column as opposed to google putting them at the bottom, because I like using those.

It is very pretty…I’m assuming the picture above is the Canadian version. I wonder if they’ll change the background picture for holidays like Google. We’ll see!