KEY POINTS:
I Don't remember the dead 3-year-old boy's name. I've forgotten most facts of the story other than he died at the hands of his parents. But in my mind's eye, I see his face in the photo smiling impishly at the camera, juxtaposed with pictures of his beaten
body.
I stared at that child's deep purple arms trying to figure out the degree of violence that must have transpired to inflict that colour. Just two photos were all I needed to make that story come alive off the page.
Why, then, did those simple images evoke far more feeling for the death of one child for me than the media onslaught covering the death of 32 at Virginia Tech just weeks before?
I had been on a busy working holiday in the United States and knew almost nothing about the mass shooting until late the next evening when I flipped on CNN.
This was my introduction: the lower third of the television screen was filled with writing. Headlines moved across the bottom of the picture. Above that was the name of the specific show, repeated across the width of the screen.
Above that were two boxes, one filled with an expert talking about the package the shooter had sent to the media, his title labelled across the bottom of his talking head. Above that, yet another banner announced that the footage I was watching was courtesy of NBC.
There's one more piece to this chaotic visual mess, the piece that stymied me: on the right side of the screen was yet another box. This box was filled with a succession of images the shooter had taken of himself. CNN had cut them together and played them on a loop that repeated perhaps every 90 seconds as others spoke from the left side of the screen.
The killer held a gun up to his head. Cut. The killer held a knife to his own throat. Cut. The killer pointed a gun to the viewer's face point blank. Cut. You saw his madness like flipping pages of a portfolio.
It took me a good three minutes to shift my attention from these sick visuals to listen to what the expert was saying. And what was he telling us?
Airing this madman's media manifesto was completely irresponsible, he argued. Giving airtime to the killer's words and repeatedly showing these images was the very thing that spawned copycat killers.
We must not air this, he kept repeating on the left side of the screen, while on the right side, oblivious to the content of its current expert's speech, CNN continued to cut to the killer pressing another weapon to his cheek.
Like some split-screen fractured media psychosis, one side couldn't connect to the other's dysfunction. What was more madness? Watching the killer display his sickness? Or watching the media lick it up despite its poison? It was like watching Dr Strangelove trying to control his own hand from raising itself into a "Sieg Heil!" - but in real time, on the nightly news.
What's more, I got used to it.
I stopped noticing the images after they rolled past me the second time around. I began tuning out the strange, disjointed message from two screens that ignored each other. I let it go. I switched off any whiff of viewer indignation when my eyes wandered to other headlines or the time in the corner.
With five or more sectors of the screen competing for my attention, how much of the real content of the message is subsumed into a societal wasteland of attention-deficit disorder? Loaded overload won. I felt absolutely nothing about that story.
News directors weigh good taste to decide their final edit. But how many measure a story's impact by gauging restraint as their most effective tool? Show me one image and I understand. Show me 10 and I see nothing.
Martin Scorsese told this month's Rolling Stone magazine: "Television today is constantly grabbing at you. You become just pummelled with information, and you become deadened. The images and the cinema become part of a junk-image world, a junk-image society. You're not going to feel for anything, and that means you're not going to do anything."
This isn't just about less is more. This is about the cost we are all paying for having to stagger under the weight of information excess that is deadening our ability to feel.
I experienced it that night as I watched the coverage of America's deadliest mass shooting.
I just went to bed.
