As you may already know, we've now got to face the fact that the Virginia Tech killer was a videoblogger of sorts: he recorded clips in between the two shooting episodes and mailed them to NBC, originally in Quicktime format. Which led me to the thought that in this radically transparent world (perhaps too transparent), these would end up on YouTube eventually.
Well, NBC posted edited clips of the Cho Seung-Hui video earlier today, which made that inevitable. I spent some time today trying to grab those and get them onto LiveLeak, since I believe that these clips - however shocking - should be widely available to the public in an embeddable form. As it turns out, a version has just been uploaded to MySpace video (seemingly while I was writing this post), so I've grabbed that one instead.
Just as with the Saddam Hussein video, I'm not totally comfortable with the radical transparency we have these days. There are all kinds of issues that arise: now we have to censor our own media consumption, will we get an "anything goes" society? Is the fact that all videos now eventually end up on YouTube something to be celebrated?