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" It&amp;#039;s 5 p.m. and you&amp;#039;re on your way home from work. Suddenly, a car crashes in front of you. In a moment, it&amp;#039;s up in flames. What do you do? Call 911 or get the entire thing on video? You can, after all, show it to the cops (when someone calls them) and maybe even get on the news. This is an extremely uncomfortable scenario, but unfortunately, as we spend more and more time recording events rather than participating in them, one that happens all too often. Most recently, witnesses in Texas filmed a fiery car crash instead of trying to help the victims inside the burning car. Police Lieutenant Anthony Williams was first on the scene at the wreck and he says what he saw left him shaken. But what frightened him wasn&amp;#039;t just the accident. As he approached the site of the accident, he saw that witnesses were standing around filming while the victims were inside burning, according to Williams. He even had to ask a woman who was trying to get a better angle to back up because she was shooting far too close to the fire. Williams calls this a perversion of social media. People rushing to record instead of help, typing up statuses and shooting photos instead of trying to do what they can to assist those in trouble. And what point is there in recording someone&amp;#039;s grisly death? &amp;quot;l just saw them literally be cremated,&amp;quot; he [Williams] told Fox Dallas-Fort Worth. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the first time I&amp;#039;ve ever prayed for someone to go ahead and pass, and I say that not to be disrespectful to the family. A person&amp;#039;s actually dying in front of your eyes, and rather than you making it a priority, putting yourself in the role of a first responder, just to try to help out in some way, you choose your priority to be filming somebody&amp;#039;s death.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You should try to help, even if it&amp;#039;s just a bottle of water you have sitting in your car to throw on a person,&amp;quot; said Williams. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t know what comfort that would have brought, but like I said before, at that point ... I just prayed that God would go ahead and take them.&amp;quot; This isn&amp;#039;t the first time something like this happened. Examples abound. Several months ago, passengers on a train in Philadelphia recorded a woman experiencing a possible heroin overdose as her young child watched. Instead of calling the police, child services, or even the conductor, other passengers recorded video of the incident and posted them to YouTube. And this wasn&amp;#039;t seconds of footage. In once case, the video lasted almost five minutes. What this says is that the problem, if not widespread, is prevalent and more attention should be paid to the way our responses to emergency situations are changing with the advent of the cell phone, the camera, and most of all, the ability to post it all onto social media. Follow Mark on Twitter. Image credit: Getty "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/news/a7133/social-media-killing-humanity/?click=rel>