London & Citizen Media
This is an interesting post from Duncan Rawlinson at The Last Minute , about citizen media and the London bombings: The The Day Citizen Media Went Mainstream.
He’s put together a eerily moving screencast of the wikipedia entry for the bombings: here.
As I think this demonstrates, the mainstream media will and must survive. The importance of professional news people paid to gather, check and disseminate news is essential to this process … but what’s new is the citizen efforts to collect, fliter, explain, and participate in the creation news media and its context.
Well, the mainstream media will survive. The question is whether it will survive in its current format, and I’m guessing no.
Comment by fling93 — July 20, 2005 @ 7:15 pm
it must change, surely. I guess what I failed to say above is that the citizen filter becomes more “important” than the original news sources, yet still impossible without them.
We had some guests here from France this past weekend, and there was a big debate about terrorism - is this new or old… the conclusion was, its old old old, just that we see immediately, on TV internet and from flickr photos when it happens. Reality has become instant. I wonder, for instance, what would have happened had flickr been around during the early Iraq war? If Iraqis had better access to the internet and cheap digital cameras?
perhaps a change in perception. it’s so easy to ignore death and destruction (the mainstream media uses it only for certaiin purposes, but it exists in many places all the time) when there’s nothign to remind us and no one wants to hear about it.
anyway … will be interesting to see how things develop.
Comment by hugh — July 22, 2005 @ 3:09 pm