A few months ago, I came across the aftermath of a fatal traffic crash near my home, at one of the busiest traffic intersections in Dublin.
It was very early in the morning and the body had already been removed. Instinctively I took out my phone and got as close as I could to the scene to take photographs from as many angles as possible of the crumpled car, which I mailed in to The Irish Times picture desk.
That was just one of several occasions in the last couple of years when I’ve taken pictures having come across the scenes of newsworthy – usually violent – incidents: crashes, a post office robbery, a fatal stabbing. I’ve never been in a position to take photographs of casualties or victims. Would I do so? Possibly, although it’s highly debatable whether The Irish Times would or should publish them.
These days, everyone's a photographer. Millions of people around the country are walking around with internet-enabled cameraphones in their pockets. In the circumstances, it's surprising we don't see more images and videos taken at the scenes of crimes, road deaths and other misadventures popping up on Twitter or Facebook.
But in a powerfully written post on its own Facebook page this week, Waterford City Fire Service said the crew at the scene of the death of two-year-old Daenerys Crosbie "were astounded by the number of people trying to capture the incident on their phones". Daenerys had been struck by a lorry Waterford city on Wednesday morning.
“ We could fill this page with photos of the injured and dead that we see. But we don’t,” wrote the fire service. “Sometimes it’s enough to know that horrible things happen without having to see them.
Quite. But it seems some people feel differently. The fire service referred to a recent incident when “a man (in his thirties, not a teenager) crept up, phone poised and recording, to within 10ft or so of a car where we were trying to extricate the driver while the ambulance crew were treating him. The driver died en route to hospital.”
The temptation is simply to suggest that digital technology is making us more callous and indifferent to the dignity and suffering of others. And there is plenty of evidence that people are very unclear about what is appropriate behaviour when using this sort of technology in public places.
But surely what’s also happening is that technology is amplifying – and sometimes legitimising – forms of human behaviour which have been around for a very long time, even if we don’t like to think about them.
It’s nearly two centuries since executions were an acceptable form of public entertainment, but our appetite for witnessing the pain and suffering of others hasn’t gone away, and is only partly sated by fictionalisations such as Love/Hate.
Newspapers have always traded on the public’s appetite for stories about and sometimes pictures of gruesome or tragic deaths. Now, when everyone can be a photographer and, through, social media, publish those photographs instantaneously, it seems natural to many people to behave in this way.
Increasingly, no event of any consequence can take place without being captured on camera, usually at the expense of seeing that event properly in the first place. Any experience of even the slightest intensity must be seen through a screen, though to what end it’s not always clear.
Does anybody ever look again at that shaky footage of the distant concert stage, or badly-framed image of some tourist landmark? The vast majority of this stuff ends up at the bottom of the digital landfill known as the cloud, never to be seen again.
It is no surprise, though, that the same instinct to document everything kicks in at the scene of a tragic accident, creating a hi-tech rubbernecking-on-steroids effect.
Unfortunately, some of this stuff then seeps out into the public sphere. In 2006 18-year-old Nikki Catsouras was decapitated in a crash at a Californian toll booth. The manner of her death was so horrific that the local coroner didn't allow her parents see here body. Within days, pictures from the scene, leaked by staff at the California Highway Patrol, had popped up on thousands of websites. The family have been entangled in legal disputes against those responsible for the leaks ever since, but the images are still online.
“Why do people do this? It’s ghoulish, thoughtless and extremely distasteful.” Waterford City Fire Service wrote. “We could fill this page with photos of the injured and dead that we see. But we don’t. Sometimes it’s enough to know that horrible things happen without having to see them.”
Perhaps this gets to the nub of the matter; there is something deeply powerful about the act of seeing human suffering and deaths, which is why a civilised society has taboos around the subject. Intruding into the work of emergency workers while they attempt to save lives is deeply insensitive and possibly illegal; taking photographs of the injured, dead and dying is not a recreational pursuit; making those images public is crass stupidity of the worst sort.
How is it possible that people don’t know this? Because what makes these technologies so great – their ease and speed of use – means that we all need to think a bit harder about how we use them and for what purpose.