On the Quiet Death of Dignity in the Age of Social Media

There is something I have been grappling with for a long time.

Sometime around 2010, I came across a photograph on a classmate's phone. A young man's head, split open by cutlasses. He was apparently a cultist who had been involved in some violent activities. The image was not blurred. It was not accompanied by a content warning. It was just there, raw and permanent, for public consumption.

I remember the physical recoil. But what unsettled me more than the image itself was a question I could not shake: Who took this picture? Someone had stood over this man, a man who had just been butchered, and instead of collapsing in horror or running for help, they had reached for a camera. They had composed the shot, and taken different angles. They had decided that this moment, this person's absolute worst and final moment, was something the world needed to see.

I did not have the language for it then, but I have been turning that question over ever since. And the more I watch the culture we are building online, the more I think that photograph was not an aberration. It was a preview.

I attended a funeral recently. Just before the interment, the coffin was opened one last time, a final viewing for family and loved ones to see the face of the deceased before the ground received them. It should have been one of the most solemn moments of the day. Instead, I watched people circle the coffin with their phones raised, recording. A few leaned in and shoved their cameras almost directly into the face of the dead, inches away, angling for the shot.

I stood there irritated and unsettled in equal measure. This was not a stranger's tragedy surfacing on a blog. This was a community of people, gathered in grief, who had so thoroughly internalized the impulse to document that even death, even this death, was not exempt. The instinct had become so deep that it no longer registered as a choice. It was just what you did. Someone dies, you record it. Someone is buried, you capture it. The solemnity of the moment was not even a speed bump.

That funeral confirmed something I had suspected for years: the photograph from the late 2000s was not the work of a uniquely callous individual. It was early adoption. The rest of us just took a little longer to catch up.

How We Got Here

The impulse to spectacularize suffering did not emerge from nowhere. It was cultivated and made profitable by an entire generation of media platforms built on the economics of shock.

Paparazzi culture and gossip blogs like TMZ taught a global audience that no moment was too private, no grief too raw, no hospital visit too sacred to be pursued with a camera and a microphone. Celebrity deaths, breakdowns, mugshots, courtroom tears: all of it was flattened into content, served with a smirk, and consumed without friction. The editorial position was simple: if it happened, it was fair game. Consent was irrelevant. Dignity was not a category.

In Nigeria, Linda Ikeji's blog and the likes performed a similar function—domesticating this behaviour for a local audience. Accident scenes, leaked intimate images, public humiliations, family tragedies repackaged as afternoon reading. It taught a generation of Nigerian internet users that other people's worst days were a genre of entertainment, and that publishing them was simply good business.

These platforms wrote the playbook. And once people understood that attention could be harvested from suffering, it was only a matter of time before the behavior migrated from media companies to individuals. The gossip blogger became a business model. And then the business model became individual behavior. The currency was always the same: attention.

Now everyone is TMZ. Everyone is Linda Ikeji. The teenager with a phone at a road accident. The bystander filming a woman having a seizure on the bus. The neighbor recording a corpse being carried out of a building. They have all inherited the same editorial logic: if it bleeds, it leads. Except now there is no editor, no newsroom, no pretense of gatekeeping. Just a phone, a platform, views, likes, shares, and an algorithm that does not distinguish between empathy and morbid curiosity. It did not matter what you were looking at, only that you could not look away.

What We Lost When We Started Filming

There is a long human tradition of bearing witness to suffering. It is among the most sacred acts a human being can perform. The witness stands in the gap between what happened and what the world might otherwise forget. The witness carries something heavy so that the sufferer is not alone in carrying it.

But the act of witnessing has always been defined by its cost. To witness is to be marked by what you have seen. It demands something of you—at minimum, presence. At best, response. The witness who sees a man beaten on the road to Jericho is morally implicated by the seeing. You cannot unsee, and so you must act.

What we are doing with our phones is not this.

When you film a stranger's worst moment and post it for engagement, you have performed a transaction, whatever you tell yourself about bearing witness. The other person's suffering is the raw material; your content is the product; attention is the currency. The act looks like testimony but functions as extraction. It is voyeurism dressed as documentation. And the disguise is so convincing that even the person holding the phone may not know the difference.

The Disappearance of the Bystander

Something has shifted in what it means to be present at the scene of another person's pain. The old moral category was the bystander, a figure defined by a choice: intervene or walk away. Both options at least acknowledged that something real was happening to a real person.

The smartphone and internet have created a third option that sidesteps the moral question entirely. You become a domesticated producer. And the grammar of production is fundamentally different from the grammar of compassion. A producer asks: Is this good footage? A compassionate person asks: Is this person okay?

These two questions cannot occupy the same moment. One displaces the other. And increasingly, we know which one wins.

The Economy That Rewards It

If this were merely a personal moral failing, a few people with bad instincts, it would be troubling but containable. It is not containable, because the behavior is becoming structurally incentivized.

Social media platforms are attention economies. They do not distinguish between attention born of empathy and attention born of morbid curiosity. A video of a stranger's medical emergency and a video of a cute toddler generate the same metric: engagement. And engagement converts to reach, and reach converts to income.

Now extend this into the near future. As artificial intelligence reshapes knowledge work, as the economic floor shifts beneath millions of people who once earned a living by thinking and writing and organizing information, I worry the gravitational pull of content creation will only intensify.

At the risk of sounding like a doomer, I think outside the trades, content distribution, the ability to capture and hold attention, may become one of the last reliable paths to income for a growing number of people.

This is the part that should unsettle us. We are building an economy in which the most intimate moments of human vulnerability are monetizable assets. And the people who will be most tempted to exploit them are the people with the fewest alternatives.

The incentive structure does not bend toward dignity. It bends toward whatever rewards doomscrolling.

What It Does to Us

We talk a lot about what this behavior does to the people being recorded. We talk far less about what it does to the person holding the phone.

Every time you frame someone else's crisis as content, you practice a small act of dissociation. You train yourself to see suffering as material. Over time, this reshapes your moral reflexes. It widens the distance between seeing and feeling. It makes you, in some quiet and incremental way, less human.

We are creatures formed by our habits. The hand that reaches for a phone instead of reaching toward a person is learning something about what matters. And the lesson accumulates.

The ancient question, what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose their own soul?, has never had a more literal application. We are trading our capacity for compassion for the possibility of virality. And we are doing it so reflexively that we barely notice the exchange.

Toward Recovery

No policy or platform tweak will fix this. The problem is deeper than that. It lives in the space between what we value and what we have been trained to reward.

Recovery begins with a simple and uncomfortable question: Why am I recording this?

Not the story you will tell yourself later. The real reason. The one that sits beneath the justification.

And here is what may be the most disquieting part: for many people, the honest answer is not even because it will make me money. Most of the people I watched circling that coffin with their phones had no audience, no platform, no monetization strategy. They were not building a brand. They were not chasing virality. They were just recording—reflexively, unthinkingly, as though the act of capturing the moment was the only way to prove they had been present for it.

C.S. Lewis described something like this in his essay "The Inner Ring": the desire to be in, to be the one who has access, who was there, who saw it, corrupts people in ways they do not notice. The corruption is not dramatic, it does not announce itself, it simply reshapes what you are willing to do in order to feel like you belong to the circle of those who know, who witnessed, who have the footage. The phone at the funeral, the phone at the accident, is not just a recording device. It is a membership card. Proof that you were close enough to see what others did not.

And I think there is something deeper at work than mere reflex or subconscious behaviour here. That desire, to be the insider, to possess the moment, is pride wearing the mask of presence. The person holding the phone is placing themselves above the sufferer. The act of recording is, at its root, an assertion of superiority: I am the observer, you are the spectacle. Your pain exists for my use. It is a quiet claim to a higher position, made without words, perhaps without conscious awareness, but real all the same. It is pride, the oldest vice, dressed in the most modern clothing.

But I have seen the opposite impulse too.

I keep thinking about something from my childhood, before any of this. I remember being at a market and watching a woman collapse for whatever reason I couldn't tell. Within seconds, the older Yoruba women around her moved in with their wrappers. They formed a wall of fabric around her, shielding her body from the gaze of the crowd. No one told them to do it. There was no protocol. It was just what you did. Someone was exposed, so you covered them. Someone was vulnerable, so you protected their dignity with whatever you had in your hands.

That instinct did not require a platform or a policy. It required something much simpler: the conviction that another person's worst moment was not yours to broadcast. That some things, by their very nature, deserve to be hidden from view.

I wonder what those women would make of us now, circling coffins and accident scenes with our phones.

There is still a version of presence available to us, one where we put the phone down, where we choose to help the injured person on the sidewalk, where we shield the body from the gaze of strangers instead of adding our own. It is less impressive. It generates no content. No one will ever see it.

The trouble with pride is that it cannot cure itself. You cannot think your way out of a posture you do not know you are holding. Something outside the self has to dislodge it. Conscience, morality, tradition, these can all restrain it. But if pride is truly the oldest vice, the deepest remedy requires something that transcends the self entirely: an encounter with the divine. The person who kneels before God is rehearsing, daily, the posture of someone who is not the most important person in the room. And it is that rehearsal, repeated and internalized over a lifetime, that makes it possible to respond to people in need in a way that leaves both people humane.