Anyone with a social media account has read the news about the recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In the incident, 17 students and teachers lost their lives and 14 more were injured. There have been videos of the shooting as the students fled from the building circulating on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. A majority of these videos and photos that were uploaded were taken from the student’s Snapchat stories.

The argument that has been brought to the public eye is whether or not the use of Snapchat in these shootings is caused by the desensitization of horrific events in youth today. There are some scenarios where the use of Instagram Live is used in an inappropriate setting, such as the case of Obdulia Sanchez, a girl who live streamed her sister’s death. However, the use of Snapchat video during a shooting is a modern day version of General Eisenhower forcing the United States soldiers during the Holocaust to take pictures of the survivors. He insisted upon this, knowing that people would not believe what he claimed to see. 

The use of Snapchat by victims of school shootings, while on a different scale than the soldiers during the Holocaust, fulfills the same purpose. The very thought of teenagers in a high school, hiding from a shooter who has already killed someone in the building is horrifying. Living through it is an entirely different experience. Whether the students who used the video feature understand this or not, showing first-hand the experience is always more powerful than simply hearing about it.

For this reason, Eisenhower knew that the photographs of the Holocaust would be important in justifying the war effort. With great wisdom he remarked, “The things I saw beggar description…I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first­hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’

The difference between photos from the Holocaust and Snapchats from the shooting is simply the technology used to document history. Photographing horrific events makes them all the more impactful: Not every use of new technology is evidence of millenial desensitization.

Photo by Taylor Woods | The Oswegonian