The 12th June Ahmedabad air disaster.
BBC News reports of the Air India crash included interviews with people who had gone to the crash site shortly after it happened. They had no direct contact with the event. They may have gone to see if they could help. But in the TV reports they are typically seen recording on their phones.

Xavier Greenwood in The Observer (15/6/25) reports how an Indian News Channel posted a passenger list on X within minutes of the plane going down, internet users found social media pictures of a British couple listed as being on the flight on Instagram and uploaded a video of them as they waited to board. Many people knew the names and details of these two people who had just died before their family and friends had been informed.

Have we always behaved like this? Is social media just a new route through which old behaviours are enacted? We have had, amongst other things, paparazzi, phone hacking and sensation-seeking red-top journalism. None of these were characterised by discretion, sensitivity and a respect for privacy. If social media is different it may be in its reach, its immediacy and in the way it gives an opportunity for anyone to impose their own judgement about what is appropriate. Bauman in In search of politics (1999) wrote about how surveillance has changed, the panopticon has become the synopticon. Now, via social media, the many watch the few.

There have been prescient sociologists and social critics, like Bauman, who have identified the social changes that are now being enacted in the context of a ubiquitous social media.

Social media and spectacle
Social media can change our perception of what is real. Baudrillard says the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. Technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning but has stripped away self-referentiality. We do not consider the person posting content, or the algorithms that structure the site. War, terrorist attacks and mass death accidents happen on our screens, they are watched then re-watched. They become spectacle, distanced from the events they show, a simulacrum where what was real is obliterated.

“Moral decline” sociology
Moving from the heady environs of post-structuralism we find a long history of “moral decline” sociology going back to Durkheim’s analysis of the moral infirmity of modernity. There is also a much older history of us thinking that things are worse now than they were. Is any decline best understood as a change in individuals or is it to do with the social construction of appropriate behaviour?

There are two strands of ‘loss’ sociology, the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarians”. Christopher Lasch wrote about The Culture of Narcissism (1979). Its characteristics include individuals having a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration and a diminished ability to empathize with other people’s feelings. It’s not much of a step to envisage such people using social media for self-aggrandisement, and seeing other people’s lives (and deaths) as copy.

Lasch’s cultural pessimism differs from a communitarian view. This considers the way widespread individualism and a decline in community erode shared values. We lose a moral vocabulary, a cultural glue of shared civility. Durkheim referenced modernity. I (humbly) add neoliberalism. It depicts us as atomised beings who navigate life by expressing consumer preferences. Our relationships with others are transactional, so why not think first of ourselves and then of how we can take advantage of others.

“It’s Not Your Story To Tell”
The ‘cultural pessimists’ strand of moral decline sociology is not optimistic about our being able to reverse narcissism. But the communitarians see some space for change. Alternate moral structures can be developed by coming together to oppose current practice.

The “It’s not your story to tell” campaign is a collaboration between professionals who respond to trauma; ambulance and police, hospitals and rehabilitation services, alongside families impacted by what is shown and shared on social media. Eve Thomas from Hirwaun in South Wales was prompted to act when, as a 17 year old, her father was left fighting for his life after being hit by a car. People at the scene of the accident had uploaded footage of the crash to social media. Eve told BBC Wales (2, July 2025) that, “The ways things were filmed and put on social media was a big part of how it all affected me.” As well as telling the people filming and uploading content that “It’s Not Your Story To Tell” she wants people to consider how their actions hurt those shocked after road accidents or grieving after a road death. “That person in front of you is someone’s parent, child, or friend. Would you want someone filming your loved one in their most vulnerable moment?”

A group of bereaved families behind a new campaign, the “Road Victim Support Northern Ireland-Donegal Campaign Group”, urge people to stop and think before they share images or details of car crashes online. Campaigner Marie O’Brien said there was no respect shown to her family in 2016 when her 23-year-old daughter Caoimhe’s name was circulated online shortly after she died in a crash and before she could tell her son (BBC News NI 31, March 2025).

Chances of change.
I’m with the cultural pessimists about getting social media to change. But I’m with the communitarians about the possibility of change elsewhere. Let’s start with the “old” media, or anywhere there is the possibility of editorial input and ask them not to follow social media’s voracious wish to stay in the here and now. Succumbing to the urgency of the moment increases the likelihood that they will be “disaster chasers”. Let’s tell them tragedy and grief are not things that should be monetised via selling copies or increasing viewing figures. Let’s say the worst experiences of other people’s lives can be a time we show the best of ourselves not the worst.