Here is a
terrific summary of citizen journalist coverage of the London bombings.. Sad
but also inspiring. Bloggers–citizens–now consistently provide
instant coverage of breaking news wherever their numbers are large
enough. From the article:
about the instant proliferation of snapshots by average Joes is how
unremarkable it was viewed by the blogging community, says technology
journalist Xeni Jardin. Of course cell-phone images proliferated; of
course citizen journalism played a significant role in the day’s
terrible events. More interesting than widely circulating cell-phone
pictures, she says, is the fact that Thursday may have been the first
time cell-phone video footage was used so extensively by high-profile
media outlets. The first video footage of the event that appeared on
CNN, after all, was videophone footage from inside one of the damaged
trains. Ever since, broadcast networks and wire services have been
actively soliciting amateur video footage and photographs.”*
From an “emergent organizational systems” standpoint, there are a number of interesting things to reflect on:
First, the event caused a near-instant replication of the well-known
three-layer structure of the bloggosphere: Some bloggers happen
to
be present at the scene, and manage to take a phone picture, file a
phoned-in-podcast, or write a note. Others are in position to
swarm to the scene, and still more are able to scan the emerging news
stream and aggregate it, summarize it, and comment on it. All in
real time. This is the second superpower swinging into collective
action with no explicit central coordination.
Second, the techology and culture of content sharing and
community-based content categorization facilitated in this case
by moblog.co.uk.,
“picturephoning.com and then Wikipedia,”* allowed the creation of a near-instant shared resource of photographs.
Third, Creative Commons licenses were applied to much of the content,
enabling sharing, derivative works, and widespread
republication–a.k.a. syndication. Perhaps most important,
mainstream news publishers were able to republish blogger citizen
content without those outlets having to make contact and negotiate
rights with the citizen producers of the content. And at the same
time, the rights of the content owners to the most important, thing,
attribution, was preserved.
the bombings: a hazy picture of a man in a crowded, eerily lit subway
tunnel, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. That picture was taken on
a camera phone by Adam Stacey, by no means a professional photographer,
who happened to be on the subway train that was hit in a tunnel outside
the Kings Cross tube station. Stacey instantly beamed the image to his
friend Alfie Dennen, who runs moblog.co.uk. Dennen published the
snapshot with a Creative Commons
license permitting anybody to reprint it provided Stacey received
credit for the photo. From there the image was picked up by
*
Overall, the response to this tragic event showed not only the
potential, but the realized capability of full-stream “really simple
syndication,” joining simple legal permission on top of simple access
to searchable high quality content aggregated from the simple
contributions of hundreds of citizens acting on their own initiative
and yet also as members of an emergent community catalyzed by the
bombings.
