Or at least so argues Marina Hyde:
To place Cho Seung-hui in some new, Web 2.0 category of killer is
absurd. He didn’t upload his madness to YouTube. He sent a single copy
of it, via what’s known as snail mail, to NBC, who could have prevented
its ever seeing the light of day, having made the civilised, reasoned
judgment that it adds precisely nothing to the sum of human
understanding.
If you leave the ‘it’ out of the last phrase, the whole paragraph is rather good actually.
I think I agree with Marina here. NBC had to decide whether to broadcast the actual material or whether to editorialise it. I don’t think broadcasting it helped; in much the same way that I don’t think TV newsrooms handing over to correspondents standing in the rain a few miles from the studio helps.
If the criteria was that everything must add to the sum of human understanding trillions of trees would be saved and millions of computers would become useless.
I like the way you think about the issue.
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