03.31.09

As the media becomes essential to our daily life, the merit and demerit are both appearing. Obviously, we get a lot of benefit from the media society, such as entertainment and cultivation. We rely on media industry too much so that forget maybe we are violated by it also.

I saw a lot of stuff of surveillance in the movies. Usually, the characters in the movie use the cameras which exist nearly everywhere to get the information they want. In the second version of national treasure, Nicolas Cage was chased by the villains so that he has to throw away the wood with important message on it. Before passing a crossroad, he got an idea. He lets his partner break the traffic rules and at the meantime he holds the wood to meet the camera at the crossroad. By throwing the wood, he escapes from the chasing of villain; also he gets the message by getting into the database. I have to say that it is amazing to see the clever way of using cameras around the crossroad. However, it is a movie. In our real life, the cameras always watch us without notice. We may notice the cameras around the cross road, but we can never know the hidden cameras which will violate our privacy.

There is an event in China recently make me think more about the effect of cameras in public. At the night of October 11th last year, a fight occurred between two groups of people in front of a bar due to some trivial quarrel. However, one of the sides in fight is a group of police and they finally killed one person in the other group. After what happened, there are several descriptions about the issue. At first, the public voice stood in the side of the dead person who is a obviously victim. However, there is a camera outside of the bar recorded the whole fight and the tape was showed on TV. From the tape, we can see that the dead person started to hit the policy several times without hearing his companions’ dissuasion. However, this is not the whole record of the event since it doesn’t show how the man be killed. It is said that the whole tape will be used as evidence in the court. But after the tape showed, the public voice turned to support the policy. Some people even said that the man is a ruffian who should be killed sooner or later. However, since the public can not see the whole record, they will never know what happened in the last few minutes and the discussion will continue. However, I guess it is a positive effect of the camera surveillance in our society. Sometimes, it can provide evidence for the controversial event.