What does it mean to be a viewer?

"This may be my last video," says a young woman broadcasting live on her social network while, like her, hundreds more await the sad fate of their lives in Aleppo.

Periscope, Twitter, Facebook Live, Youtube, Snapchat ... In the last hours we have been able to follow the suffering, the anguish, the pain of people that we would never know existed in a situation that for most of us is very far from reality. We gained "eyes" and a unique interpretation of the facts that no journalist or any TV channel would be able to promote. I share the upheaval we all feel today about what is happening in Aleppo, but I would like to bring one more thought:

What is the further step we can take to stop being voyeurs and become actors and participants in what we call reality?

We live the era of real-time, streaming, the here and now (and then never again). Not long ago we were able to wait until the news time to know what had happened in the world on the day that had passed. Today we see live hostages in Aleppo clamoring for their own lives, white helmets rescuing people in the middle of debris after a bomb that we could see live falling and hit the same place. In the same way that we consume this kind of information, we follow and communicate on social networks like Periscope with people who are similar to ourselves. Worldly beings who share a chunk of their existence transmitting live by Snapshat their incredible world, but often is just like ours. Today we have the video, the character, the story that is shared by your friends on Facebook's timeline. With the same liquidity, tomorrow will be the next video, character, story. The liquid age.

We live the era that entertainment is at our fingertips. Where reality and the virtual world go together ... and often get confused.

Night in Sacramento. Carlos Gonzalez, 26, and his friend, Damon Batson, 29, drive through the streets. They show on Periscope a gun and challenge their viewers saying they will not be caught by the police. One person asks on the network if this was real, and as evidence Gonzales shoots through the car window. The two continue the action by broadcasting the way to the house of Batson's girlfriend, who apparently was betraying him with another guy. They arrive and find the house empty. By the next morning, the police had not been notified about the case, even the video of friends having been seen thousands of times by thousands of people last night. No one called the police to warn them.

Mary Aiken, a forensic expert, mentions that this is a well-known phenomenon in military psychology where it is easier for a sniper to kill the distance than near. We participate while what is happening is out of our reach, but the closer we are, the more we tend to ignore that it exists. The line between what is real and what is entertainment is increasingly blurred. We lack the ability to build empathy, and we end up becoming voyeurs unable to take action in situations that we as humans know to define as wrong or right, but as spectators, we choose not to judge.

What does it mean to be a viewer then?

The fast and even aggressive way we receive and consume content today is not going to change. For me, it will only get more and more intense. My reflection is how we will be able to "model" this culture that is being born and who we are in the midst of so much information. I do not wish to be a person who shares a video of the last moment of a person's life in Aleppo. I wish to be a person who can take some action and use access to information as a weapon for good. Is it possible?