Wikipedia explains that instant replay is responsible for making American football popular. "Viewers struggled to disseminate the action from a wide shot of the field, on a small black and white television screen. However, with replay technology, 'brutal collisions became ballets, and end runs and forward passes became miracles of human coordination.' " We simply didn't see all of this going on without instant replay.
As American readers also know, instant replay is being used in both college and professional games to review officiating decisions. Instant replay brings scrutiny to NL officials explains that officials frequently have decisions overturned, but the humans are making decisions in real-time, at full speed, whereas instant replay shows a specific play much, much, slower, and without other distractions. But we have become used to decisions being overturned.
All week the news channels have covering the pepper-spraying at the University of California. A video of the police pepper-spraying demonstrators has provoked considerable criticism and comment. Some have even demanded that the chancellor of the campus be fired. What I'm wondering is whether the instant replay from sports as infiltrated our culture and whether that is a good thing.
There were some poignant photographs during the Vietnam War that evoked the emotions of a nation, and left deep scars. Recall the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from a village mistakenly bombed with napalm. Or the photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong soldier, Nguyen Van Lem.
In retrospect, those images corrected wrongs, perhaps like the pepper spraying at UC-Davis. Suppose there had been a video running on the BP oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico when things turned horribly wrong last spring and resulted in the oil spill. Would a public video have improved corporate responsibility and behavior? Probably yes, right?
If we were machines without emotion, without a future, and if we were measured by similar machines without emotion, then constant video surveillance would probably yield a more efficient world. But we are not, and images or surveillance only captures what is occurring in front of the lens, not the whole context. Would any of us assume any risk if we knew our attempt was being captured for instant replay?
Could the founding fathers of the USA have produced the constitution if there had been instant replay?
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