you know what's a bit fucked we will be watching g this war via tiktok with people only. arimg about the likes
I don't know that that's that different to how people 'consumed' the Vietnam war, right? Vietnam was the first truly televised war and people watched it whilst eating dinner in the safety of their homes. Yes, social media revolving around 'likes' makes the distaste of that even more prevalent.
From one perspective, it is really pretty strange that people consume war as televised media in any format. From another, a big reason why the Vietnam war became unpopular in the United States, was that people could actually see it and hear it and become disgusted by the cruelty of it. In fact I think it's pretty important, even more so when states like Russia would absolutely love for anything pro-Ukrainian or showing Ukrainian resistance to be hidden, for people across the world to be able to freely pass along information, videos, critiques, to be able to see evidence of any war crimes being committed, to hold Russia to account.
Yes, teenagers on tiktok fetishizing war for their weird little narcissistic ventures is deeply irritating, but ultimately I think social media is a great tool for resisting totalitarianism or challenging it or for the world as a whole to become privy to what is occurring.
I do think there's becoming a concerning level of purity culture around consumption of media as well. The act of watching warfare on your television, for example, is it inherently bad? Could it be argued that the mediazation of warfare has lead to a time period in which people are far, far, far more reluctant to engage with war or want it? May it be the case that the enthusiasm that occurred prior to WW1 (and yes, it did occur) has died out around warfare, because people are so much more educated now on it's horrors and have seen it on their tv?
It's like I've seen some truly brain dead takes recently about how people should 'stop making biopics about (dead) women they can't ask for consent.' There are certainly nuanced takes to give about how women are portrayed in these works or what the work's intention is, but to outright state that a whole genre of creative work (biopics or arguably all of historical fiction and non fiction) should be off the table because you can't ask the people in them for consent to the storytelling...really weird opinion if you ask me. It's getting to the point where the internet is full (of often young people, like 20 and younger) writing post after post which, when boiled down to its essentials, is really an advocation for censorship.
