Irish Examiner view: Maintaining our humanity in the era of smartphone wars

The conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine will come to be known as the first smartphone wars, with much of the information circulating on social media unmediated by the intervention of any trained or accredited journalist

Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following a Russian attack in Brovary, near Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday. Picture: Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP

It is often proclaimed that Vietnam was the first ‘television war’, and that the impact of scenes of carnage and mass destruction broadcast daily into the homes of peace-loving people around the world — and in particular the living rooms of American citizens worried about their boys — would render future conflicts unsustainable.

In part, this was due to an astonishing rate of growth in the ownership of television sets. The number of US households which possessed a TV at the start of the Korean War in 1950 was 9%. By the mid 1960s, it was 93%.