Internet Changes Everything

Cellphone journalism

TheStar.com - Cellphone journalism

"The content of any medium is always another medium." — Marshall McLuhan

Rarely has the truth of a sociological observation smacked us in the face with more force than it did two days ago, when local readers of both this newspaper and the National Post were confronted with images so purposefully grainy, they seemed to be diffusing before our very eyes.

Justifiably, much has been made of these cellphone photographs of the aftermath of the London bombings as a defining moment in "citizen journalism."

"The participatory nature of the news coverage of the London bombings ... erases the line between those affected by the news and those who cover the news," wrote Tim Porter on his media blog, First Draft.

What's fascinating is the way this new-media phenomenon is couched in old-media concepts.

"There was a cliché that journalists write the first draft of history, '' Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media, told the New York Times. "Now I think these people are writing the first draft of history at some level, and that's an important shift."

Given the almost instantaneous posting of hundreds of "amateur" photographs on the website Flickr, it seemed less like a collaborative first draft than a multitude of different drafts. The result wasn't so much a Rashomon-like narrative as a disorienting din of storytellers, each reading from a different book — one that might, in time, end up comprising one epic, unfinished manuscript.

There are still, however, two sides to every story.

"The accumulation of data, and then of context, becomes the story we need to read," Gillmor wrote on his blog. "It's not just one story, and it never was for people who wanted more than superficial coverage.

"We need the citizen journalists' coverage, and need better ways to get at it. But early this morning, for the context I craved, I turned to the professionals first — online, of course ..."

Perhaps what those blurry images ultimately accomplished was a reaffirmation that, as McLuhan observed, "the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves ... "

— John Sakamoto

July 10, 2005 at 09:20 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home