In recent months I've noticed that several hundred people visited my personal weblog based on Google and Yahoo! searches for "gory pictures." This rather disturbing phenomenon was the result of my
commenting back in July 2003 on the media's use, or non-use, of photographs of
Saddam Hussein's dead sons after they had been shot up rather thoroughly by U.S. troops.
Today the Pew American & Internet Life project has a report showing that
millions of Americans are turning to the Internet specifically to find disturbing information and images about the Iraq war that did not appear in mainstream media. There are some interesting breakdowns by age, sex, education, household income, and political affiliation on the question of whether it's wise for those images to be online. Here's a particularly interesting point in the report:
"Almost one-quarter of Internet users have actually seen the graphic and disturbing war images that appear only online. They come away from the experience of mixed mind: 51 percent of those Internet users felt they had made a good decision in looking at the images, 33 percent wish they hadn't seen them, and 7 percent volunteered that both of these impressions were true for them.
"One cohort, women, stood out from the rest as more than half responded negatively to both questions we posed. Of the 16 percent of women who have seen the war images online, only 36 percent say they felt they made a good decision in doing so; 52 percent said they wish they hadn't seen them, and 3 percent said both."
What do you consider Gory? I wish you would explain...
