We’ve had a submission from ‘Lateral Zoo’ (thank you!), bringing this video to our attention: “Lion tries to eat baby PART 1.”
Doesn’t sound nice?
Well, they are at a zoo and there is glass between the baby and the lion, but it is this glass that seems to be a bone of contention amongst video viewers – will it or won’t it break? Is its presence more alarming or less alarming to our heart rate?
Embedding has been disabled, but you can watch the video on YouTube.
We watched another video featured alongside this one: “Lioness tries to eat baby at the zoo.” which seems to follow a trend in ‘eat baby’ video titles. As we saw before with the I Hate Balls campaign, comments on more controversial videos can be brazen and often go off-topic:
I was hoping it eat the little bastard !
– victoryou81
F-ing jerks for teasing the Lion……I wish it did eat that baby.
– musakil1
Your grammar and the incessant use of ellipses is worse than your lack of humor. Please kill yourself and avoid having progeny who might turn out to be more stupid than you are.
Signed ~ Jesus
– johnlovestohate
Invisible barriers
There is much distance seen here: the glass between the lion and the baby, the digital barrier between the baby’s experience and the short scene caught on camera, then the geographical distance between the video viewers and their faceless comments, how close are we *actually* to one another?
In these instances do we slip in to an Uncanny Valley, much like the human-like robots we explored before for Viral Pandas?
How close is close if in reality we are worlds apart?
Are we right to have concerns about an alarming separate yet deceptively close connection?
There’s no doubt that the Internet brings many positives to our lives on every level and streams for digital media are improving, changing and enhancing our experience all the time, but will we ever merge our online and offline experiences, not just with Web 3.0 integration, but physically?
We came across another video this week, which represents well the areas we have been interested in. We recently looked at Human and Animal Ink – that is, tattoos and skin. We considered perfection and body modification, also responsibility and transference.
Here’s a video of a man who inserted magnets in to his arm to hold his iPod Nano.
The video does contain some mildly graphic scenes and blood, but it has been edited with taste and not sensationalism.
Food for thought.
Viral Pandas 