Here’s how the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is playing out on the Internet’s latest window into the human experience, YouTube.com: Videos of young girls driving around smoking and joking about Hezbollah, next to shaky footage of grieving men toting dead bodies through rubble as sirens wail. Old propaganda films alongside homemade documentaries about the conflict.
Internet video sites such as YouTube became a hit this year as people shared their funny homemade movies with the world. Now the site serves as an unfiltered look at a wide spectrum of experience as rockets and bombs are falling on Israel and Lebanon.
In a matter of weeks, YouTube has become a video Dumpster for a global audience to share firsthand reports, military strategies, propaganda videos, and personal commentary about a violent conflict as it unfolds. Anyone can post movies for free, and the site boasts that 100 million videos are watched daily. It is a disorganized bazaar of images that requires visitors to search for a specific topic; searches for both “Hezbollah” and “Israel” yield hundreds of videos, some of them violently graphic, others not so serious.
In a message to Hezbollah, a man asks, “I was wondering if you guys have any nuclear bombs, and if so, what are you planning do with it? How’s the war going over there? Do you guys ever go to YouTube.com? Peace.” Another video warns to “proceed with caution” before viewing because it shows a bloodied man who appears to be dead. Some groups have posted gritty black-and-white footage of bombs hitting military targets in Lebanon.
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