THINKBOX

Snap-happy revellers never learn the lesson. Photographic records of sin aren't supposed to be worse than sin itself, but sometimes they are close. The latest incident, quickly dubbed the army scandal, involved a photo showing a group of soldiers in an act that looks like an orgy with a woman. A gang rape, some charged. Mutual consent, others defended. Punishment, however, has been rightly promised by the Army Chief against the participants. To observers, the moral and philosophical debates entail: is such punishment is meted out against the orgy, or against taking pictures of the orgy and posting them online?

In a way, you can defend an orgy (at your own risk, look at the Marquis de Sade), but can you also defend the act of capturing an orgy for photographic keepsakes and sharing them with the world? In the times we're living in, our obsession with turning everything into a photographic record _ our pleasures, mostly, but also our vices _ have become something like a performance. There's a whiff of naive, harmless, celebrity ambition when we snap pictures of our food, pets, happy trips, and publish them in the digital nebula. When it comes to darker, more dubious activities, the mental high is intensified. The ease with which we can record our criminality _ small or large _ and keep it as a souvenir or advertise it as a cool stunt has become a psychological phenomenon that will be studied in academia for decades to come.

The Thai privates obviously thought it was fun to snap pictures of their private debauchery. Just like those celebrities embroiled in sex-clip scandals. Or like the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who recorded the torture they administered on prisoners. Or, the story surfaced last month, like the US troops who posed, smiling, with mutilated corpses and body parts of Afghan insurgents. The sense of triumphalism is visible in those pictures. Shame wasn't factored in, otherwise they wouldn't have pressed the shutter in the first place. Shame often comes later when the high is usurped by something else, such as guilt, remorse, indefensibility. Their mementos of triumph _ the pictures _ become their Trojan Horses.

Ordinary, non-celeb, non-uniform people have our shares of sinful pictures too, but they hardly become headlines. Browse the internet, and it doesn't take long before you come across web pages of self-appointed sex icons with extremely dodgy, barely legal photos of them in the act, or near-act, complete with bragging captions.

When it comes to high-profile cases however, the incriminating photos give us a clue to what this is all about: besides the narcissism, it's about power and the desire to confirm it. Various cases are indicative of the specific power society assigns to public figures. Sex clips of movie stars stir excitement and Schadenfreude, because stars are often associated with sexual power. Photos of military personnel in the act of disgusting violence and subjugation _ torture or alleged gang rape, for example _ affirms the soldiers' official license to use physical force but also condemns their abuse of that socially-approved license. Again, their power becomes their defeat, their Trojan Horse.

So what's worse, the act or the photo of act? I might have to summon the spirit of Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes to help. The two great minds would have to work hard to adapt to our era super-saturated with digital imagery, so much so that the concept of reality wobbles like earthquake-hit houses. Old questions remain, then some new ones: Do people become less real or more real in front of a camera? The photographer always films the act, but can he always film the intent? How much does the instantaneous distribution of images influence our concept of narcissism and shame?

Caught in the act, the soldiers are punished by their generals, and celebrities by their fans. That's the simple part. The harder one is when we know that people _ you, me, we, soldiers, stars, even monks _ will continue to be tempted by the magic of recording devices to keep our pleasures and pains as souvenirs and to test the limit of our own powers. It's right: snap-happy revellers will never, ever learn.