(video from This American Life illustrates how cameras change our behavior)
Interesting article from TechCrunch about Fort Hood and the state of Citizen Journalism:
Excerpt:
For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social
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media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.
…none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.
Chuck Olsen chimes in:
I think your cautionary warning is a good one. We should take a step back and consider our shifting personal and social boundaries.
That doesn’t mean you should condemn the entirety of citizen journalism, and in fact you haven’t presented a case for that. I co-founded a citizen journalism non-profit called The UpTake, and we’re proud to have produced stories not seen elsewhere, either because corporate media outlets didn’t have enough monetary interest (MN senate recount) or we simply had more people on the street with cameras (RNC).
A single eyewitness twitter report from inside an army base, or a single child’s statement that his brother was in the balloon — unverified reports from a single source should always be met with healthy skepticism.
We simply have more raw news and opinion streaming over and around us. We have to be smarter news consumers and triangulate the truth.
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