TED | 网络时代的看客（视频+中英对照翻译+MP3音频）

2017-07-04 本文已影响30人 TED博物馆

Why public beheadings get millions of views

TED简介：2015 | 还记得鲁迅笔下的看客吗？那群麻木不仁爱看热闹的人们。现在网络时代何尝不一样也存在着数以万计的看客们？当ISIS恐怖组织发布斩首人质的视频后，仅仅几天时间内在英国本土的视频下载和点击量就突破百万。看客们抱着与我无关的心态，出于各种心态与好奇，围观别人的不幸。这背后折射出的是怎样的一种扭曲人性？而且正是因为看客们的这种行为，更加促使了ISIS斩首更多的无辜的世界公民，帮助他们达成昭示天下的目的。

演讲者：Frances Larson

片长：16：01

网络时代的看客（视频+中英对照翻译+MP3）

中英文对照翻译

For the last year, everyone's been watching the same show, and I'm not talking about "Game of Thrones,"but a horrifying, real-life drama that's proved too fascinating to turn off. It's a show produced by murderersand shared around the world via the Internet. Their names have become familiar: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo.

过去的一年中，大家都在收看同一档节目，我指的不是《权力的游戏》，而是现实生活中的一场闹剧，它骇人听闻，却有让人无法抵挡的强大吸引力。这是一场由杀人凶手摄制，而后通过网络在世界范围内传播的表演。受害者的姓名我们都很熟悉了：James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Hennings, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo.

Their beheadings by the Islamic State were barbaric, but if we think they were archaic, from a remote, obscure age, then we're wrong. They were uniquely modern, because the murderers acted knowing well that millions of people would tune in to watch.

伊斯兰国对他们的处决是野蛮残暴的，但如果我们以为这些刽子手来自某个遥远、陈旧、不为人知的年代，那就大错特错了。事实上，他们是非常与时俱进的，因为他们的行为说明其深知无数人将会观看他们的视频。

The headlines called them savages and barbarians, because the image of one man overpowering another,killing him with a knife to the throat, conforms to our idea of ancient, primitive practices, the polar opposite of our urban, civilized ways. We don't do things like that. But that's the irony. We think a beheading has nothing to do with us, even as we click on the screen to watch. But it is to do with us.

新闻媒体将他们称作“野蛮人”，因为屏幕上一刀割喉以示征服的画面，同我们对远古时期，原始行为的想象相吻合，而与现代文明和道德伦理完全相悖。我们绝不会做出类似的事情。但这恰恰是讽刺之处。我们以为就算点击观看了视频，一场斩首处决也与自己毫不相干。但事实并非如此。

The Islamic State beheadings are not ancient or remote.They're a global, 21st century event, a 21st century event that takes place in our living rooms, at our desks, on our computer screens. They're entirely dependent on the power of technology to connect us. And whether we like it or not, everyone who watches is a part of the show.

这场伊斯兰国的公开斩首并不是发生在遥远的古代。这是21世纪全球性的事件，它就在我们的客厅里、桌子上、我们的电脑屏幕中发生着杀人凶手们完全依靠技术手段与我们产生联系。无论我们是否情愿，每个观众都是这场表演的参与者。

And lots of people watch. We don't know exactly how many. Obviously, it's difficult to calculate. But a poll taken in the UK, for example, in August 2014, estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley in the few days after it was released. And that's just the first few days, and just Britain.

而观众的人数相当可观。我们没有确切的数据。显然这实在难以统计。但通过2014年8月在伦敦的一项调查，可以粗略估算出在对James Foley的处决视频发布之后的短短几天内，已有约120万人观看。这还只是刚开始的几天内，而且仅仅在英国。

A similar poll taken in the United States in November 2014 found that nine percent of those surveyed had watched beheading videos, and a further 23 percent had watched the videos but had stopped just before the death was shown. Nine percent may be a small minority of all the people who could watch, but it's still a very large crowd. And of course that crowd is growing all the time, because every week, every month, more people will keep downloading and keep watching.

2014年11月美国一项类似的调查表明， 9%的受访者观看了斩首视频，此外还有23%的人点开了视频，但在受害者遇难前一刻退出了观看。在所有可能观看的人中， 9%也许只是个很小的部分，但这个数字代表的仍是十分庞大的人群。并且人数还在不断增长，因为每周、每月，都会有更多的人下载、观看。

If we go back 11 years, before sites like YouTube and Facebook were born, it was a similar story. When innocent civilians like Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, were beheaded, those videos were shown during the Iraq War.

其实在11年前，在YouTube、Facebook这样的网站还没出现的时候，就发生过类似的事情。像Daniel Pearl，Nick Berg, Paul Johnson 这样的无辜平民被斩首时，相关视频在伊拉克战争期间被发布了出来。

Nick Berg's beheading quickly became one of the most searched for items on the Internet. Within a day, it was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos, Yahoo. In the week after Nick Berg's beheading, these were the top 10 search terms in the United States. The Berg beheading video remained the most popular search term for a week, and it was the second most popular search term for the whole month of May, runner-up only to "American Idol."

对Nick Berg的斩首视频迅速成为了互联网上搜索次数最多的条目之一。一天之内，就在Google, Lycos, Yahoo这样的搜索引擎上登顶热搜榜。这些是Nick Berg被斩首后的一周内，在美国排名前十的搜索项。Berg的斩首录像占据了搜索榜榜首整整一周，还在整个五月份的搜索统计中排在第二。仅次于“美国偶像”。

The al-Qaeda-linked website that first showed Nick Berg's beheading had to close down within a couple of days due to overwhelming traffic to the site. One Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing figures rose from 300,000 to 750,000 every time a beheading in Iraq was shown. He told reporters 18 months later that it had been downloaded many millions of times, and that's just one website. A similar pattern was seen again and again when videos of beheadings were released during the Iraq War.

最初发布Nick Berg斩首录像的基地组织相关网站，甚至还因难以负荷巨大的访问量不得不关闭了两天。一位荷兰的网站所有人表示，他的网站日访问量从30万增加到了75万人次，每一次点击都意味着在伊拉克的处刑又被播放了一次。一年半后，他告诉记者该视频已被下载了数百万次，这还只是一家网站的数据。伊拉克战争期间其他的斩首录像公布之后，发生的事情如出一辙。

Social media sites have made these images more accessible than ever before, but if we take another step back in history, we'll see that it was the camera that first created a new kind of crowd in our history of beheadings as public spectacle. As soon as the camera appeared on the scene, a full lifetime ago on June 17, 1939, it had an immediate and unequivocal effect.

社交媒体给这些影像的传播带来了前所未有的便利，可是倘若我们回顾更早的历史就会发现，在那段公开处刑被当做聚众狂欢的时期，最先创造出一种新型“围观人群”的，是照相机。1939年6月17日，相机一登上历史舞台，就立刻产生了显著的影响。

That day, the first film of a public beheading was created in France. It was the execution, the guillotining, of a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann, outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. Weidmann was due to be executed at the crack of dawn, as was customary at the time, but his executioner was new to the job, and he'd underestimated how long it would take him to prepare.

那一天，第一支公开斩首的影像在法国诞生。其内容是对德国籍连环杀手Eugen Weidmann在凡尔赛圣皮埃尔监狱外的断头台上执行的处决。按当时的习惯，Weidmann本应在凌晨被处死，但当天的行刑者是位新手，他低估了自己做好准备所需的时间。

So Weidmann was executed at 4:30 in the morning, by which time on a June morning, there was enough light to take photographs, and a spectator in the crowd filmed the event, unbeknownst to the authorities. Several still photographs were taken as well,and you can still watch the film online today and look at the photographs. The crowd on the day of Weidmann's execution was called "unruly" and "disgusting" by the press, but that was nothing compared to the untold thousands of people who could now study the action over and over again, freeze-framed in every detail.

因此Weidmann在早晨4:30才被处决，在六月的这个时间，已经有足够的日光来拍摄相片了。人群中一名观众瞒着当局，对这一事件进行了摄像。同时还拍了几张照片，时至今日，你仍然可以在网上找到这段影像，浏览这些照片。当天围观Weidmann处决的群众被媒体称作是 “难以控制的”和“令人作呕的”，但这与如今能够一遍又一遍研究这出情节，能够在每个细节处定格画面的成百上千不知名的人们相比，简直不值一提。

The camera may have made these scenes more accessible than ever before, but it's not just about the camera. If we take a bigger leap back in history, we'll see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. In London, as late as the early 19th century, there might be four or five thousand people to see a standard hanging. There could be 40,000 or 50,000 to see a famous criminal killed. And a beheading, which was a rare event in England at the time,attracted even more.

照相机或许能让公众更方便地获得这些影像，但这并不是唯一的影响因素。再向前追溯一段更久远的历史，我们会发现哪里有公开司法处刑和斩首，哪里就有围观群众。在19世纪早期的伦敦，一次绞刑的观众约有四五千人。倘若被处死的罪犯臭名昭著，那么人数有可能增加到四五万。而在那时的英国，十分罕见的斩首则具有更大的吸引力。

In May 1820, five men known as the Cato Street Conspirators were executed in London for plotting to assassinate members of the British government. They were hung and then decapitated. It was a gruesome scene. Each man's head was hacked off in turn and held up to the crowd. And 100,000 people, that's 10,000 more than can fit into Wembley Stadium, had turned out to watch. The streets were packed. People had rented out windows and rooftops. People had climbed onto carts and wagons in the street. People climbed lamp posts. People had been known to have died in the crush on popular execution days.

1820年5月，五位“卡托街的阴谋家” 因密谋刺杀不列颠政府成员在伦敦被处决。他们先被绞死而后又被砍头。场面惨不忍睹。五个罪犯的脑袋被轮流砍下而后展示给围观者。有整整10万人前来观看，比整个温布利球场可容纳的观众还要多1万人。一时间万人空巷。有人向外出租（看得见行刑台的）窗户和屋顶。有人爬上路边的马车。有人攀上街边的路灯。还有的人据说在行刑日拥挤的人群中丧生。

Evidence suggests that throughout our history of public beheadings and public executions, the vast majority of the people who come to see are either enthusiastic or, at best, unmoved. Disgust has been comparatively rare, and even when people are disgusted and are horrified, it doesn't always stop them from coming out all the same to watch.

证据表明纵观公开行刑与公开斩首的历史，绝大多数前来观看受刑的人就算不是特别狂热，也至少是持麻木的态度。极少有人觉得恶心、厌恶，就算真的感到恶心和恐惧，通常也并不妨碍他们加入围观人群。

Perhaps the most striking example of the human ability to watch a beheading and remain unmoved and even be disappointed was the introduction in France in 1792 of the guillotine, that famous decapitation machine. To us in the 21st century, the guillotine may seem like a monstrous contraption, but to the first crowds who saw it, it was actually a disappointment.

有关人们看到砍头，却能保持无动于衷，甚至感到还够不过瘾的最典型的事件，恐怕是在1792年的法国，那架著名的斩首机器， “断头台”的面世。对于21世纪的我们，断头台可能算得上是骇人听闻的诡异装置，但它却令它的第一批观众大失所望。

They were used to seeing long, drawn-out, torturous executions on the scaffold, where people were mutilated and burned and pulled apart slowly. To them, watching the guillotine in action, it was so quick, there was nothing to see. The blade fell, the head fell into a basket, out of sight immediately, and they called out, "Give me back my gallows, give me back my wooden gallows."

他们已经习惯于观看行刑台上持续长时间的折磨，看着人们被砍断手脚、活活烧死、慢慢撕裂。对他们而言，断头台上的演出结束得太快了，没什么好看的。刀身下落，头颅掉进一只篮子就立刻不见了踪影，于是他们喊道， “还我们绞刑架！把木绞架抬回来！”

The end of torturous public judicial executions in Europe and America was partly to do with being more humane towards the criminal, but it was also partly because the crowd obstinately refused to behave in the way that they should. All too often, execution day was more like a carnival than a solemn ceremony.

欧美范围内残酷的公开司法处刑的终结，一部分是出于对罪犯的人道主义关怀，但同时也是因为围观人群的行为举止着实太有悖常理和人性。一而再，再而三的，行刑日与其说是严肃的仪式，不如说变成了狂欢节。

Today, a public judicial execution in Europe or America is unthinkable, but there are other scenarios that should make us cautious about thinking that things are different now and we don't behave like that anymore.

今天，无论在欧洲还是美国，一场公开处决已是不可想象的了，但我们仍然无法简单地认为一切都不同了，这样的惨剧不会再重演了。

Take, for example, the incidents of suicide baiting. This is when a crowd gathers to watch a person who has climbed to the top of a public building in order to kill themselves, and people in the crowd shout and jeer,"Get on with it! Go on and jump!" This is a well-recognized phenomenon. One paper in 1981 found that in 10 out of 21 threatened suicide attempts, there was incidents of suicide baiting and jeering from a crowd. And there have been incidents reported in the press this year. This was a very widely reported incident in Telford and Shropshire in March this year.

我们不妨说说“诱导自杀”。这指的是人们聚集起来围观那些爬上高层公共建筑顶楼企图自杀的人，而人群中时常冒出 “快点儿啊！”“跳下去啊！” 之类的叫嚷和嘲讽。这种现象早就屡见不鲜了。1981年的一篇论文指出，每21起受到威胁的自杀行为中，就有10起出现了人群中的讥笑，也就是所谓的诱导自杀。今年的报纸中也出现过相关报道。这是今年3月在特尔福德和什罗普郡被广泛报道的事件。

And when it happens today, people take photographs and they take videos on their phones and they post those videos online. When it comes to brutal murderers who post their beheading videos, the Internet has created a new kind of crowd. Today, the action takes place in a distant time and place, which gives the viewer a sense of detachment from what's happening, a sense of separation.

这种情况发生在当今，人们通常会掏出手机拍照、摄像，再把影像上传到网络。类似的，当残暴的刽子手在网上传播录制好的斩首视频，互联网又创造了一批新的围观人群。正因为这些事情发生在触不可及的时间和地点，从而让观众产生了与之毫不相干的心理，一种疏离感。

It's nothing to do with me.It's already happened. We are also offered an unprecedented sense of intimacy. Today, we are all offered front row seats. We can all watch in private, in our own time and space, and no one need ever know that we've clicked on the screen to watch.

“这和我没有关系”。“这一切已经发生了”。同时我们还获得了前所未有的亲密感。我们仿佛身处贵宾席。能够在空闲时间、私人空间里独自观看，并且没人知道我们到底浏览过什么。

This sense of separation -- from other people, from the event itself -- seems to be key to understanding our ability to watch, and there are several ways in which the Internet creates a sense of detachment that seems to erode individual moral responsibility. Our activities online are often contrasted with real life, as though the things we do online are somehow less real. We feel less accountable for our actions when we interact online.There's a sense of anonymity, a sense of invisibility, so we feel less accountable for our behavior.

这种疏离感——不论是与他人还是与事件本身——似乎成了理解我们为何能够观看这些残暴行径的关键，而互联网通过产生疏离感而逐渐侵蚀个人道德责任感的例子还有不少。我们在网上的行为举止往往与现实生活反差巨大，似乎互联网上的行为并不那么真实。在网上，我们会觉得不必对自己的行为负责。由于网络匿名带来的隐形感，我们感到并不需要为自己的言行负太多责任。

The Internet also makes it far easier to stumble upon things inadvertently, things that we would usually avoid in everyday life. Today, a video can start playing before you even know what you're watching. Or you may be tempted to look at material that you wouldn't look at in everyday life or you wouldn't look at if you were with other people at the time. And when the action is pre-recorded and takes place in a distant time and space,watching seems like a passive activity. There's nothing I can do about it now. It's already happened.

在网上也更容易发现一些真实生活中我们会尽力避免的东西。现在，有些视频甚至在你还没意识到在看什么的时候，就会开始播放。又或者我们会浏览平时不会去关注，以及有旁人时不会去观看的内容。于是，当整件事已经事先被拍摄，并发生在遥远的时空距离之外，观看貌似成为了一种被动行为。 “我现在对此无能为力”。 “这一切已经发生了”。

All these things make it easier as an Internet user for us to give in to our sense of curiosity about death, to push our personal boundaries, to test our sense of shock, to explore our sense of shock.

所有这些都让作为互联网用户的我们更轻易地屈从于自己对死亡的好奇，拉低自己的个人道德底线，去考验、去探究自己对冲击感的承受力。

But we're not passive when we watch. On the contrary, we're fulfilling the murderer's desire to be seen.When the victim of a decapitation is bound and defenseless, he or she essentially becomes a pawn in their killer's show. Unlike a trophy head that's taken in battle, that represents the luck and skill it takes to win a fight, when a beheading is staged, when it's essentially a piece of theater, the power comes from the reception the killer receives as he performs.

然而事实上我们并非被动的观众。恰恰相反，正是我们在满足杀人犯的表现欲。斩首中受害者被绑住无力反抗的时候，他或她本质上已经变成了刽子手的表演道具。传统战争中作为战利品砍下的头颅，象征着胜者蒙受的上天眷顾和超凡的战斗技能，与此不同的是，当斩首作为表演被呈上舞台，当它已然成为一出戏剧，这些罪犯的表演得到的反响，正是操控力的来源。

In other words, watching is very much part of the event. The event no longer takes place in a single location at a certain point in time as it used to and as it may still appear to. Now the event is stretched out in time and place, and everyone who watches plays their part.

换言之，观看行为实际上是这一事件中相当关键的部分。这件事不再如同以往或是它今后仍将呈现出的那样，仅仅发生在特定的时间与地点。如今它在时空中得到了延伸，使得每一位观众都变成参与者。

We should stop watching, but we know we won't. History tells us we won't, and the killers know it too.

我们真的应该拒绝观看。但我们知道自己做不到。历史说我们做不到，刽子手们也对此一清二楚。

Thank you.(Applause)

谢谢（掌声）

Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Let me get this back. Thank you. Let's move here. While they install for the next performance, I want to ask you the question that probably many here have, which is how did you get interested in this topic?

布鲁诺·吉桑尼(BG)：谢谢。我来拿着这个吧。谢谢。我们往前站一些。趁着工作人员准备下一场演讲，我想问一个可能在座很多人都会好奇的问题，为什么你会对这个话题感兴趣呢？

Frances Larson: I used to work at a museum called the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which was famous for its display of shrunken heads from South America. People used to say, "Oh, the shrunken head museum, the shrunken head museum!" And at the time, I was working on the history of scientific collections of skulls. I was working on the cranial collections, and it just struck me as ironic that here were people coming to see this gory, primitive, savage culture that they were almost fantasizing about and creating without really understanding what they were seeing, and all the while these vast -- I mean hundreds of thousands of skulls in our museums, all across Europe and the States -- were kind of upholding this Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality. So I wanted to kind of twist it round and say, "Let's look at us." We're looking through the glass case at these shrunken heads. Let's look at our own history and our own cultural fascination with these things. BG: Thank you for sharing that.

弗朗西斯·拉森 (FL): 我以前在一家博物馆工作，牛津的皮特河博物馆，那里来自南美的头颅标本非常有名。人们总说，“噢，头颅博物馆，头颅博物馆！” 那时候我恰好在研究用于科学方面的头骨收藏史。正当我研究这些颅骨藏品时，我突然意识到一件讽刺的事，人们到这儿来是想感受他们可能在脑中构想过的血腥、残忍的原始文明，却从未真正理解他们眼前的展品，而一直以来我们博物馆里那些遍及欧美大陆的数以万计的头骨藏品——从某种程度上说，成为了推进思想启蒙运动的科学基础。所以我希望能够调转人们的目光，来“看看我们自己”。我们和这些头颅标本一样，都在透过玻璃罩子观察对方。让我们开始省视自己的历史文化，以及对这些事物的想象吧。BG：感谢你的演讲。

FL: Thank you.(Applause)

FL：谢谢！（掌声）

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