The gruesome murder of a woman in a Kampung Baru budget hotel yesterday was a story enough in itself: A young Indonesian woman checks into hotel at 9:00am with two men, goes upstairs with one of them, and he leaves at 12:55pm.
Housekeeping goes upstairs shortly thereafter and find the woman, murdered and lying in a pool of her own blood.
What happened next though was straight out of an episode of popular dystopian sci-fi program Black Mirror, which has examined voyeuristic titillation in the White Bear episode, social media-sharing obsessions in Nosedive and even a touch of the power of social media, like in The National Anthem, where users and the medium possess the power to re-frame seemingly sordid topics into content fit for public consumption.
While the body of the murdered woman was being carried out by officials, a crowd gathered to film it and upload the scene to Facebook. She was someone’s daughter, and possibly sister, or even mother — a person — but that’s not important anymore.
There are no faces, just arms and recording screens. There is no value in what is being filmed, other than to satisfy the curiosity of voyeurs after it gets uploaded onto the internet.
Oh humanity, is nothing sacred? Where is the respect for the dead? Those who have died under tragic circumstances?
Sadly, the thirst for media consumption seems to be increasing our long-term desensitization to the world around us. The US National Library of Medicine/National Institute of Health has found that as our exposure to gore in media becomes increasingly more frequent, the negative emotional response one would initially feel, habituates, and it all becomes normal to us.
Police have since arrested one of the men, and are looking for the second.
May the woman, whoever she was, rest in peace.
