When an illegal immigrant burned 57 year old Debrina Kawam to death on the New York subway just before Christmas, the utter uselessness of the police officers at the scene attracted most attention. That no cop grabbed a fire extinguisher, or even threw their jacket over the blazing victim, sparked justified shock and indignation.
The non-response of these officers of the law overshadowed that of members of the public, who variously watched transfixed, flapped a jacket at the victim to no effect whatever, or filmed the unfolding horror. At least two grim videos resulted; we watched them with a mix of moral outrage and voyeuristic fascination. But passive filming by onlookers has become routine at scenes of crime, accident and disaster. Accordingly that particular behaviour attracted little comment.
Since at least the advent of YouTube almost twenty years ago, boosters of new media—Elon Musk for one—have been heralding the arrival of a new era of citizen journalism. But if the ad hoc cameramen and -women of the world resemble any kind of journalist, it is one of the more invisible, even disreputable kinds: the stringer.
While stringers rarely stray into the public eye, anyone who’s seen the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Nightcrawler will know what their work entails.
In Dan Gilroy’s celebrated debut picture, Gyllenhaal plays the gaunt, owl-eyed Lou Bloom, a petty thief in LA who, when he turns freelance videographer, carries his penchant for criminality into his new calling: to cruise the city streets after dark in quest of raw material—the aftermath of violent crimes and accidents, preferably in “good” (white) neighbourhoods. Predictably, he becomes the star of his own story as he blurs the line between observer and participant.
Clearly, Nightcrawler’s disturbing elements resonated powerfully with audiences in the middle of the decade: a seemingly autistic antihero, autodidacticism and DIY journalism, cutthroat competition in a declining industry, the media onslaught of ever-more explicit images and the collapse of privacy.
Nightcrawler strikes me as prophetic in other ways too. The ubiquity of the smartphone has made potential stringers of us all, and a Lou Bloom-like response to violent or otherwise dramatic incidents is now the norm. Traditional stringing and “legacy” media professions in general are in decline, but new grifts are arising in their place. The influencers who seek out threats to life and limb, or contrive them for themselves, are becoming familiar figures. Last year, during Hurricane Milton (category 5 at peak intensity), some clout-chasing Instagrammers and TikTokers decided to ride out the storm in Florida, in defiance of an order to evacuate. In this case, there was a further echo of Nightcrawler in the way truth fell by the wayside, as some influencers pushed dubious (to say the least) theories of government weather manipulation. Chemtrails, followers learnt, were being employed to steer hurricanes toward Trump-supporting states.
Traditional stringing and “legacy” media professions generally are in decline, but new grifts are arising in their place.
Hair-raising videos from Milton didn’t grace my X timeline last year, but a memorable clip which did showed the aftermath, on a country road in Tennessee, of an incident that had somehow left a car upside-down and kebab-skewered on a crash barrier. The citizen journalist in this case, the father of the young driver, had sped to the scene in his SUV and seemed in no doubt about his priorities: first shoot the video, taking care to make it suspenseful, and later take his (shaken but not visibly injured) daughter to hospital.
Mimesis is a partial explanation for why “nightcrawler” behaviour at crime and accident scenes is now so widespread—ordinary people are copying influencers. A deeper question is how such influencers, who tend to derive content from the news of the day, have come to rival, and in a few cases eclipse, traditional celebrities—actors, singers, athletes and so on. Economics surely provides part of the answer: the erosion of economic security in recent decades, with the stable career fast becoming an obsolete notion, has spurred on the growth of influencers and of side hustles generally. The years since 2008 have seen economic precarity intensify substantially, both for the working classes of the West (the continuation of a decades-long trend), and for its middle classes (more of a new development). However, it may be helpful to take account of psychological, not only financial, insecurity. With so much work now viewed as meaningless—think of how office roles are now routinely dismissed as ”email jobs”—the experience of living a valued, justified and dignified life is in short supply. The clout-chaser, then, seeks recognition at least as much as material gain.
