On Being a Bystander

I’ve found myself recently thinking about a news story I saw earlier this year. This past February in Argentina, a dolphin that was close to the shore was taken out of the ocean by beachgoers, then passed around and handled as tourists posed for pictures and took selfies with the mammal. Despite their contribution to the endangered Del Plata dolphin’s death, these beachgoers, composed of adults and children alike, still continued to keep the animal “alive” — in a far less conventional sense of the term — through their digital photos and videos of the creature that were later posted to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other form of social media.

Sadly, out of all the beachgoers on the shore that day, as confirmed by the resulting death of the dolphin, not a single person placed the importance of the animal’s reality highly enough over it’s future digital presence to return the creature to the water where it belonged.

We are in a new age of the Bystander Effect. We all learned in high school psychology classes about the social phenomenon of the bystander, and the famous example of Kitty Genovese’ murder. Historically, this effect is based on the idea that the more people that are present at an event that calls for action, the less probability that anyone will actually act.

However, in our current day and age, this definition is complicated by the existence of our online presence: we are always bystanders.

This is evident in the fact that I know about this event on the beach. I can watch a video of it through Sky News, I can see the photos, I can view the articles. However, there is nothing I, nor anyone else who sees this media, can do about it: and this is the frustrating reality that has hit America in today’s society. And it brings us to an important question: if we were present on the beach that day, who would we have been? The bystander? Would we have done anything at all?

Our online presence poses a conflict in that we are often limited to our role as bystanders locationally. In our current political and cultural climate, this has created many unforeseen societal effects — we want to take action, but we can’t all be at the beach with the dolphin, or in Ferguson, or in Orlando, or in Dallas. But we still see all the injustice in the world.

For me, as a white college student working at a coffee shop near the beach this summer, I could not have been farther away, both locationally and societally, from the national conflicts that have emerged this past week. But each morning I wake up and I scroll through my Twitter feed, and I wonder how I am able to continue living my life the way I am when so many others in this country do not have the same social and cultural luxury. I long to be able to do something to help, but I am stuck in a bystander sense of limbo: limited to just watching injustices through videos and photos and adding my two cents through tweets or posts, if only to communicate with others so that they may become bystanders too, if it means that they will be informed.

However, we are not all online bystanders watching from great distances. There are people at the events that the rest of us watch through a screen: and opposite of the age of Kitty Genovese, these people can actually make a difference through their careful inaction with reality and their action digitally.

For an example, thanks to the composure and quick thinking of Philando Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, in the face of direct danger and violence this past week, the world was able to see the footage of the tragic event as it was happening live via Facebook Live, leading to outrage and creating a national discussion. In this situation, Reynolds gave us the power to actually be bystanders; to be witnesses to injustice in order to create change.

This was not what Facebook originally intended with their Live feature, but users have seen its potential and it now appears that it is too late to turn back. Americans and others around the world have taken it upon themselves with our modern technology to allow others to be bystanders: a new phenomenon for the 21st century. We see things that anger us, things that disturb us, and ultimately things that have the power to call us to action. We see live footage of shootings, we view Snapchat stories of rallies, we see video clips from politicians themselves on the House floor hosting a sit-in for gun control.

We are bystanders — but we need to not be the beach bystanders, losing a life to gain a digital presence. We need to redefine the term by becoming active bystanders, which may sound like an oxymoron, but in the modern world of consistently viewing media that we cannot act upon we must at least use it to expand our consciousness and understanding. In this way, we can use our digital presence to promote action over inaction, and change over a cycling standstill.