Not with a bang...

With a paragraph in the Evening Standard, and a bit of monstering in The Sun, the predicted national crimewave of Summer 2005 grinds to a halt.

Update from Torbay Magistrates' Court

Back in the day, happy slapping involved filming common assaults with cameraphones. Now it seems a common assault qualifies as a happy slap, not the other way around. Thus a "happy-slapping pensioner was told yesterday to 'count to ten' before lashing out again" (Metro, 4 December 2008, p.17). He didn't film his antics.

If we can't dump the happy slapping label, at least let's use it accurately.

Beyond my comprehension

(Austrian) kids these days. How do we test their grasp of English? Have them interview me (see p.2). Weird.

Panoramic views

Here we go again. Does anyone recall the happy slapping scare of 2005? Then as now, these "fight clubs" are at worst a handful of local assaults, situations that most conscientious adults could break up if they weren't scared of the kids. Yet again we see a nation-wide scare being constructed out of children behaving badly with new technology. Could the discovery of this new social problem be linked to a forthcoming Panorama broadcast? I couldn't possibly comment...

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On a not totally unrelated note, I am commenting on Paul Gormley's book in 7 Days this week.

Still With Us

My comments on happy slapping live on at this link. The full reference is Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, "Happy Slapping – Urban Violence in the Age of Camera Phones", Monu: Magazine on Urbanism 07-10-06, BRUTAL URBANISM ISSUE. Enjoy.

New trend, _Old Boy_, same old bollocks

It had to happen. Following the Virginia Tech massacre, mass media gets the blame. There are plenty of commentators who see the killings as connected to YouTube, ranging from sensible treatments of meaningless nihilism to "mass media for the YouTube generation" (Paul Harris, "Killer made his own horror film", Daily Mail, 20 April 2007: 10-11).

The Daily Mail regrets the end of the 19th Century, but it has briefly joined the 20th with a typical complaint about old media (film) and copycat violence. "In Cho's sick mind he carried images of a violent movie", says Harris. How can we actually know this? The Mail supplies no evidence of what exactly was in Cho's mind, nor could it be expected to. Even the evidence that Cho saw the movie Old Boy (2003) is lacking.

Instead the article relies on Cho's martyrdom video clips showing "disturbing parallels" and "striking parallels" with scenes in the film. I would suggest that if a human being is photographed putting a gun to his/her head or wielding a claw hammer those photographs will look like certain production stills from the film Old Boy; short of evolving differently shaped bodies and heads, there is no getting away from this fact. The Mail's online caption - "Seung-Hui puts a gun to his head in another apparent attempt to copy the violent 2003 film" - is another example of a daft parallel based on completely different things happening to look the same.

The article is accompanied by a box piece enumerating the similarities between Cho's manifesto and Old Boy (Richard Shears, "Revenge tale with gruesome scenes of death and torture", ibid). The point about each comparison is that it relies on things in the film having (vaguely) similar descriptions in real life. Each observation is brought in as "evidence", but there is nothing in the article that proves the killer even saw the film. How can we say it caused the killings - "the ultimate Quentin Tarantino movie", apparently? We can't - there's no proof at all.



PS. I better be right about this: I bought one of my best mates the Old Boy DVD for his birthday last year. Any massacres he carries out in future are his own fault entirely, OK?

PPS. While I was writing this an apartment burned in the next street. I was going to slate the crowd of rubberneckers who'd gathered to watch -- some did video it on their cameraphones and you can probably find it on YouTube soon if you cared to -- but most of them had been evacuated from the apartment itself, and had little choice but to stand around until the fire was extinguished. Apologies for thinking the wrong thoughts, folks.

*Also in the Mail: the video fight club for toddlers.

When images rule the earth

Happy slapping banned in France - five year's inside for posting the material on the internet. South Yorkshire police go into meltdown over CCTV footage of a beating being made public. (Having spent half the 1990s dealing with that particular branch of the "service", I can't say I'm very sympathetic to them on this occasion.) In my neck of the woods, a typical Friday afternoon at the mall involves taking cellphone snapshots of women in defiance of new laws, to exchange with other leering men.

This follows hot on the heels of the conviction of chanting loon Abdul Muhid for soliciting murder (i.e. chanting anti-British slogans on a demonstration). While his words will get him some jail time, his earlier actions - smashing a Walthamstow bus shelter - netted a fine that was less than the value of the damage to the shelter itself.

How are we to make sense of all this? Where's Jean Baudrillard when you need him?

Validating voyeurism

"It's likely happy slapping will run its course" editorialised the Evening News, part of the Scotsman group, in response to this story (7 February, log-in required). Maybe, but not when the mainstream media comes close to legitimising it. "$500 000 for Anna Nicole death video" was the reported offer from the Entertainment Tonight satellite TV show (The London Paper, 9 February 2007). What's their going rate for footage of Steve Irwin's death?

Slappy hanging

From Images of Empire to the Empire of Images

Whatever you make of the execution of Saddam Hussein, it didn't take long for the PR wheels to come off. Sky News found its diplomatic correspondent saying Saddam was the only dignified person in the room; John Prescott found it "deplorable" that the footage was caught on cameraphone.

Half a world away, some apparently equivalent cinematography was haunting the teaching profession (links here, here, here and - less connectedly - here). Since when did capturing foul behaviour on digital video make it that much worse than before? Certain assumptions were developed in media studies and feminist critiques of pornography about the harm caused by images. (Others debated the progressive political potential of imagery, but that's another story.) I'm not sure when it was, but at some point these ideas became mainstream.

Advocates for the victimised use such ideas to lodge their complaints in increasingly wounded tones. Even when the old brute Saddam gets happy slapped on the gallows, it's filming it that is deemed unacceptable. Recorded humiliation is a terrible thing. Coming up next, Celebrity Big Brother 5.

Harry slapping

"My Harry's Off to Iraq", says royal girlfriend Chelsy Davy in a Sun front page story (27 December 2006). Trips to Reno, NV and Rio de Janeiro will help her relax while her beau is stationed overseas. Needless to say, equivalent trips are not planned for the partners of other combatants.

When "Haz" gets to Iraq, a game of "chopper chicken" might be in order. The same day's Sun reported that four soldiers stood still as an Apache helicopter gunship roared past. "To beat boredom, thrill-seeking forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are vying to come up with the most daring film clip. Top brass have blasted the craze and fear someone will be killed" ("Let's play chopper chicken", p.5).

It sounds like happy slapping to me, although a man with a hammer sees nails everywhere. (I'm also reminded of my grandpa's account of military life* as a mixture of tedium and danger.) One step on from Princes who dress up as chavs, I suppose.


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