THERE USED to be a day when getting footage was expensive and sometimes dangerous; now it’s as cheap as microchips. With a mobile, a camera and a computer, you can load images up to social media in seconds. Any event, any place, anywhere can have instant replay across the world. It is revolutionising the way news and information is gathered.
Two events this week have highlighted the pitfalls and the power of this ever-increasing phenomenon. The first were the floods that swept through Cumbria in Britain with deadly consequences. Both BBC and SKY were encouraging viewers to send in their pictures: easy airtime filler, dramatic, authentic, ‘as it happened’ photos and videos without the cost of camera crews. For the effort, your name broadcast: John from Blackburn with his first-hand footage of rivers bursting banks and cars being washed away.
Exciting viewing, except the desire for fame meant roads were clogged by snap happy amateur sleuths hoping to get their pictures on prime time TV. A senior Cumbrian Police Officer pleaded for sightseers to stay away as they put peoples’ lives at risks by impeding the rescue services.
The second event was more serious. A journalist sent me a YouTube link of a film secretly taken by a friend in Somalia. It showed the stoning to death of young woman last week for adultery. It was unbearably brutal: it would never have been allowed to be seen by western media. Her friend had filmed the incident from beneath a burka: certain severe punishment if she had been caught. She decided to release it anonymously on social media.
Shots like this could never be shown on British TV news which has codes of conduct about showing the moment of death in detail.
Throughout the social media – from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube – photos and film are posted every minute that breach codes of conduct, laws of copyright, personal privacy and government laws. From pornography to celebrity parties, from inside Guatanemo Bay to soldiers on the frontline telling it how it really is: images are escaping censorship and regulation.
There is no way of authenticating the photos and film and without informed analysis we cannot always make sense of what we see, but what is certain is the revolution taking place is accelerating beyond all borders and changing the face of news journalism forever.
A stoning in Somalia can be seen on a sofa in Seattle in the time it takes to press the Enter key. Some will use this terrible film to pressure for change, others will simply be spuriously curious, a worse group of sickos will see it as part of the cult for snuff movies.
However we measure the effect, ‘citizen journalists’ are going to play an increasingly powerful role in how we get information. Whatever their motives, greed, fame or reform, we need to decide how to deal with information sources that are unaccountable.
