This always happens to me; I have a solid idea coming to a project only to question it a few weeks later. I came into this class wanting to get down to the nitty gritty of digital media and incitement. However the more I research, the more it appears that incitement happens "over there" and "fighting words" happen here.
My hope was to connect the International Criminal Tribunal in Rwanda (ICTR) media incitement case with digital media and incitement here in the United States; essentially bring what happened in Rwanda 17 years ago to the forefront of possibilities for incitement here. Sadly genocide is still taking place in more places that we'd care to think. The general perception is that genocide only occurs as it did in the Holocaust with gas chambers or as it did in Rwanda with machetes. The truth is that genocide can take many forms and a group or a government does not have order cement shoes in bulk to commit genocide. What are the risks our digital media could present here that could incite some form of genocide on our soil? What group could be the target?
Perhaps the digital media doesn't even have to incite genocide but criminal acts aimed at a particular group, such as the Nuremburg files which, again, was not incitement. How immediate does the act have to be to be considered incitement? Is the threshold too high? And how come the topic I was so excited to write about has become a monster with a mind of its own? C'est la vie...
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