One way of looking at it….
After Ft. Hood, Paul Carr has written a rather interesting piece for Tech Crunch noting that ‘Citizen Journalists can’t handle the truth’.
For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.
Once video cameras were rather rare pieces of technology. Hard to believe, but true. Â Very few people had one.
In 1990, when I started working in Sweden, we bought the rights to America’s Funniest Home Videos. We were going to produce a Swedish version. The problem was that almost no one in Sweden had home video cameras.Â
Today, everyone has a video camera – and those who don’t soon will as 4G brings live streaming video to every phone in the world.
What was once a rarity is now in everyone’s hands. Â And this means that events like the tragedy at Ft. Hood or the streets of Iran are now going to happen live and be streamed live, all the time.
It’s a change.
It’s going to be a very different world. Â
And unlike the This American Life story above, there will be no teachers to tell us ‘put the cameras away’ and end the experiment.  This is the way life is going to be from now on. The technology is not going away.
So this requires instead a change in the way that we think about and interact with the technology.
Video is a powerful tool of communication. It is about communicating ideas. Â And you can use it in a wide variety of ways. Â At its simplest it is pure voyeurism. Â Turn on the camera and point it at something grotesque. Â The upshot is the now infamous Neda Agha Soltan video from Iran. A young woman bleeds to death in front of us in Teheran.
But this kind of stuff only touches the surface of what video might do.Â
After the invention of the printing press, the nobility was deeply disturbed by the notion of every peasant running around reading and writing. Â Deeply disturbed. Because if all of the peasantry learned to read and write, who would gather the wheat? Â All of society would fall apart.
Print literacy for the masses turned out to be not so bad.
Video literacy for the masses will also turn out to be not so bad – but it is going to create a very different sort of culture, just as the printing press did.
The secret to the power of the printing press was that the people had to be taught to read and write. Universal literacy unlocked the enormous potential of the printing press- and without universal literacy, the press would have been almost worthless. Â The great power of the press lay not in its ability to print books that the nobility wanted, but rather to print ideas that the former peasants had.
Until now, television news and journalism have been in the hands of the ‘nobility’. Â They use this incredibly powerful machine to tell the rest of us, the peasantry, what they think is important.
Now, for the very first time, it is the peasants who are taking up the machine, the presses. Â This is very very unsettling for the nobility.
But the jinni is now out of the lamp. Â
The fingers of the peasantry are now on the touchstone of the world’s most powerful medium. But they don’t know what to do with it yet.. except point it at interesting or grotesque things.
If the peasants (us) can learn the language, the grammar, the nuance of this medium; if the real power of the medium can be captured and harnessed  – then we will really have something interesting.
In the This American Life cartoon above, the teachers close down the video ‘experiment’ because it got out of hand. Because the students ‘lost their humanity’.  No, on the contrary.  The students engaged with their innate sense of curiosity.  The cameras spread like wildfire (both in the cartoons and in real life) because it resonates with the most basic of human instincts – to tell stories.
The mistake the teachers make in the story is that instead of harnessing this unique marriage of deep desire and technology, the crush it. Â They should have directed the students to take their ‘cameras’ out into their community, out into the world to document and learn and experience and record. Â Not crush – focus and direct.Â
The folks at Ft. Hood or on the streets of Teheran with their small cameras are no different. They want to follow that most basic human instinct – unchanged since the paintings on the walls of Lascaux.
5 Comments
Rachelle November 10, 2009
I agree that Ft. Hood is not a good example of citizen journalism … it was a controlled message in mainstream media.
Shortly after Ft. Hood, there was a shooting in Orlando where a disgruntled employed came back for revenge, walked into a large office and started shooting everyone in site. The “real” journalists (if you can call local news that) were drooling to be the 1st to get the biggest and bloodiest statistics to report. One channel started reporting that 17 were shot and killed. At the end of the day, only one person died and 5 were injured.
Despite the “dirty laundry” style crappy journalism, social media was successfully used to catch the suspect. As soon as the police knew who they were after, his name and photo were uploaded to the web and broadcast out to mobile phones via text and im’s. My boyfriend was even getting automated voice messages describing the suspect and warning that he was armed and dangerous. They caught the jerk quickly with the help of mass communication thru mobile phones.
Now that video is streaming from phones and people are able to upload instantly to Twitter, I think journalism (as well as entertainment) is going to continue to evolve … and evolve more quickly than we’ve seen anything grow before.
On a lighter note … the Twitter feed for @ShitMyDadSays just signed a deal with CBS for a show. A funny story told … only 140 characters at a time.
http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/from-twitter-to-tv/
Nino November 10, 2009
So Rachelle, what do you do for a living, are you involved with an established news organization or you just like to play Monday morning quarterback.
I spent two days working the Orlando shooting. I got a call from one of the national networks if I could go and lend a helping hand. Less than half an hour after the first police 911 call the network had in place several cameras, a helicopter, a live satellite truck and a team or reporters. Each reporter was strategically placed in areas of potential information. Several on site plus some at the local hospital, police headquarter and even at the mayor’s office. Any information or misinformation came from the authority as they we trying to figure what was happening, also before any announcement the reporters made sure to relate to the public that the information were released but not confirmed by the authority. The situation in Orlando although not as tragic as Ft. Hood was considerably more critical as the shooter left before even the police was able to get there, meaning that the shooter wasn’t in custody like in Ft Hood but he was on the loose. It was the media responsibility to inform the public of the potential danger, and they did an admirable job. While all this was going on there were investigative reporters searching about the company where the shooting took place and in a short time they also had the identity of the shooter and his background, including that he was a former employee and he recently filed for bankruptcy. He was apprehended without incidents a short while later.
Only about two hours passed from the first 911 call to the arrest of the suspect the media did an outstanding job, they did what they were supposed to do, keep the public inform with as much information as it was available.
Remember one thing, news is information that the public need to know. News isn’t video or photography, nor is writing or radio, web isn’t news either. These are merely means to convey the information, news is hard work and it requires intelligence, and intelligence is the missing element in the new wave of VJ and CJ.
steve November 09, 2009
ft. hood is a poor example as the gov’t has controlled the message from the start (and evidently continue to). i happened to catch streaming newscasts @ noon today from both indianapolis and pittsburgh (both abc affiliates) where the LOCAL voiceover of each city’s anchor was done word-for-word exactly the same. talk about a consistant/controlled message.
if ida didn’t weaken, and came onshore as was predicted, you’d see a far better slice of citizen journalism.
you don’t need credentials when levees break.
Michael Rosenblum November 09, 2009
I don’t disagree with you, but you also are not going to put the Jinni back in the bottle. The cameras are out there, as is the web, as is the natural human instinct to do this. Given that reality, the best you can do is educate people, starting at the public school level, about the grammar, power and realities of digital media, as well as teaching them about verity in reporting, from the age of 5 or so. You can’t just close the whole thing down so you have to grapple with how to make it work better. It is not going away, damaging or not.
$ November 09, 2009
“For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.”
After all that long post, you ignore the very quote you included in the story and failed to fully address the issues it raises.
Citizen journalists failed that day.
If they even tried to do anything at all unless they were citizen journalists who were no where near the event, yet felt it their duty to add to the uninformed misinformation.
This is a case in point which validates the need for real responsibilities from real journalists.
Not people who have taken a four day course and wasted a couple of thousand dollars to accomplish nothing.