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One of those photos that circulates around the internet and email inboxes - you may have already seen it - is of the end result of a minor car accident where a silver hatchback has been somehow lifted on to the raised concrete barrier in the centre of an Oxford road so that it is sitting, balanced perfectly, on its undercarriage with the wheels dangling like a child's feet off a swing.
On his Flickr pages, the photographer has added a caption that assures us that no-one suffered personal injury, as far as he could tell, in the road traffic accident; the photo shows, in fact, two people standing bemusedly outside the car, with one trying to sort out the mess on her mobile phone.
The lack of personal injury is important, of course; just as in something like You've Been Framed, it's the images or videos that look like they really hurt the person involved in the accident on film that put a worrying twinge into the amusement that you'd otherwise feel. However, the fact that there's an upcoming TV programme being heavily trailed in which entertaining Brits abroad let cameras film the aftermath of their holiday injury in hospitals abroad may suggest that there are plenty of people who disagree with me.
That said, the wheel-dangling car is not alone on Flickr; the social networking aspect of the site allows photos by different people to be kept in groups of similar themes, or 'pools', and this one's in a pool of accident pictures. Several of the images in that group also carry assurances that no-one was hurt in the car accident depicted, so it can't be everyone that disagrees with the idea that the levels of pain related to a picture matter.
There's probably an interesting psychological experiment to do here. You could take a photo of a car crash of some kind, or borrow one of the many on Flickr with a shareable Creative Commons licence, then tell six people that the driver was fine and another six that the accident caused broken bones, whiplash and psychological trauma. There's a good possibility, I think, that if you asked each group to score that image out of ten the ones who know that there's no guilt attached to liking the photo will give it a better score.
It happens with films, too; I remember watching The Crow, completely unable to rid my memory of the fact that the central actor died in a freak accident with a prop gun during filming. That must have influenced my appreciation of the film; sadly, I have no control group to compare my response to, as everyone I was friends with then was equally aware of the fatal work accident that the actor had suffered.
Returning to my original car accident image, I can't imagine finding a control group for my score-out-of-ten experiment either, as it might be too well-known to find enough people unaware of it. But - if you're one of the people who have not yet seen it - I can provide a link here.
