Imagine that you could watch the documenting of your beating or shooting on your mobile device as you get killed.
This has happened numerous times to news photographers / camera operators / journalists but ordinary citizens either being unaware or ignorant is much different than the taking of professional risks.
Shocking footage has captured the moment an Egyptian photographer filmed his own death through his lenses.
The grainy footage shows an Egyptian solider aiming and shooting at Ahmed Samir Assem, before the film goes black.
The 26-year-old photojournalist was shot dead on Monday as he took photos outside the Republican Guard building in Cairo, where some believe the ousted president Mohamed Morsi is being held.
He was one of at least 51 people killed when security forces opened fire on a large crowd that had camped outside.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
'Around an hour later, I received news that Ahmed had been shot by a sniper in the forehead while filming or taking pictures on top of the buildings around the incident.
How do we distinguish between and at what moment in conflicts will we see the convergence of professional and amateur selfies - certainly that's started as criminals attack journalists in Baltimore.
With the recent traumatic news of Danny Bowman, the 19-year-old UK resident who attempted suicide after being obsessed with taking "selfies", the general public has vocalized strong opinions on both sides of the social media debate.It's no question that we are developing a dependence on the technological advance that unifies billions of people, but are we addicted? The Fix spoke with four different leaders in the field to uncover the growing obsession with status updates, and what this means for our psychological well-being.
Hal Foster's take on this
Here the camera/body entity becomes the subject of the event in a kind of phenomenological displacement. The moment of death is captured through the spatial relations defined by the camera and not the representation of the deceased subject captured on the image. The picture of one’s own death is empty from the representational drive of the image of the death of the other. As opposed to similar videos capturing the death of others in similar situations, this video is devoid of the kind of sadomasochistic aspect of disaster spectatorship that Foster writes about. The subject is split in relation to the disaster Foster writes, “even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.” The thrill in this video, is not of witnessing the death of the other, but is the thrill of witnessing one’s own death through the camera viewfinder.
Everyone will be on TMZ, COPS, or both.