william watkin's blog (since 2003)

As Twitter resists the sharing of graphic images of the Brussels Attack, is the Twittersphere finally developing a real social conscience? An interesting moral and ethical debate is emerging on Twitter over the broadcast of graphic images of the Brussels terror attacks.  Within minutes of logging on this morning, as you might expect by now, I was able to see multiple images of severely wounded people and watch videos of the panic and fear of the aftermath of the blast.   Two women sit stunned on a bench, the shoe of one missing, her foot dripping.  A man lies on the ground, his legs outstretched before his incredulous regard.  They are framed in red and the angle appears odd, wrong somehow.  A woman flees the airport wearing white jeans with scarlet, bloodied knees.  A man's head pours with blood as someone tries to staunch it with an item of clothing, a scarf I think.   Yet under the heading “graphic images” there are probably twi...

Judith Beheading Holofenes--Artemsia Gentileshi LAST OCTOBER I WAS STANDING IN MY KITCHEN, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing machine. I kept glancing out of the window, anxious that one of the military helicopters which often overfly the estate was, at that very moment, hovering above. Surveillance is in the air after all, at least figuratively. But there was nothing, no movement whatsoever, save a red kite ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre’. It seemed an apt, apocalyptic image, but as for the bird itself, I dismissed it. Kites aren’t even real birds of prey, but scavengers that survive on road-kill, picking at the corpses of precipitous pheasant and hesitant deer. Temporarily satisfied that I was unobserved, I made my way up through the house to my attic office. But once I reached it my anxiety resurfaced, and I closed the blinds on the dormers before sitting down at the desk. For a moment, distracted, I fiddled with the fabric fraying o...