The Day Citizen Media Went Mainstream

I couldn't help but notice how different my media consumption has been surrounding the terrorist attacks in London from  September 11th.  When my girlfriend came and hammered on my door on the morning of September 11th I turned on CNN and just watched.  When I heard about the bombings in London I looked it up on Flickr, Nowpublic, Wikipedia, Wikinews to mention a few.

It seems the editors/writers/journalists at the dinosaur blogs did the same.  In fact, not only did these old school media folks go online for their news gathering, but they took citizen's media and ran front page stories with it.

You probably saw the image that Adam Stacey took on his cameraphone:

It was posted here with a Creative Commons license.  Then the image immediately appeared here, then here, then here and then onto the cover of many newspapers in London and abroad.  It has been viewed almost 70 000 times on Flickr, as well as millions of times on other more popular sites and newspapers.  This was just one of the examples (among many) where normal people became frontline media gatherers.

"On Thursday morning in London, only minutes after the fourth terrorist bomb blew the top off a red double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, editors at the Times of London on-line unit called for readers to e-mail photos of the disasters unfolding around the city. The BBC website did the same. Over at the Guardian Online, editors directed people to post digital pictures on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com. One cellphone snapshot at Flickr, which captured the murky despair and chaos on a crippled Underground train, became an early icon of the attacks and was picked up by the websites of the Guardian, the Evening Standard and other papers."  Globe and Mail 

"A grainy cell phone video taken by a survivor gave viewers worldwide their first look at the London Underground bombing -- and shined a spotlight on a small but growing part of electronic newsgathering."Hollywood Reporter 

"Among the more striking photos appearing online after Thursday's coordinated London explosions was one of a double-decker bus, its front intact but its sides and top ripped open. The image, on the BBC's Web site, came not from a staff photographer but from an amateur who happened on the scene with a digital camera." Forbes 

"As journalists scrambled to cover the London bomb blasts, ordinary citizens went online to share pictures snapped by cameraphones and reports of what they saw. At Technorati.com, a search engine for blogs, eight of the top 10 searches Thursday were related to the blasts." Wall Street Journal

"Some of the most intimate images of yesterday's bomb blasts in London came from cell phones equipped with cameras and video recorders, demonstrating how a technology originally marketed as entertainment has come to play a significant role in up-to-the-minute news." Washington Post

"The images that defined the media coverage of the July 7 London terrorist bombings, which claimed more than 50 lives, came not from professional news crews but from everyday people."  National Geographic

All of this inspired me to want to capture the day I'd like to remember not for the attacks (although I'll never forget) but for the day citizen's media officially went mainstream.  So I created this screencast (~40 MB .mov MIRROR 1, MIRROR 2 thanks Michael, MIRROR 3 thanks Jared, MIRROR 4 thanks andrew, MIRROR 5/CORAL?) of the Wikipedia entry for the attacks as animated by Dan Phiffer's Wikipedia Animate Greasemonkey script.  The script was created as a result of Andy Baio's contest.  The idea was inspired by Jon Udell's screencasts.

It shows the first 923 edits to the Wikipedia entry.  You can also see the date and time of the edits flashing near the top.  I sped the video up to keep it short and the result is a time lapse in the development of a Wikipedia entry as events unfolded that day.  The entry itself now has over 2300 edits.

I think I created this as a response to how I feel about the events.

Terrorism represents the absolute worst in humanity whereas the response to these attacks, from the Wikipedia, to the blogs, to the international solidarity, to the overall resilience of the Brits represents the best!

Check out my feed for more videos

You can plug it into iTunes like this.

Update 1:  The song is called Future Proof and it's by Massive Attack.

Update 2:  Thanks for all the Diggs!

Update 3:  Thanks for all the disses too! Yikes!  Why the negativity?  I made this thing for fun!  I didn't expect anyone to take it so seriously...

Update 4 Thanks for the mirrors dudes!

citizenjournalism london londonbombing citizenmedia screencast wikipedia

Comments

[Sean]

really good point - this is an interesting turning point for first-hand journalism. i remember i just went from one tv to another watching CNN when 9.11.01 happened... the first place I went to after the London bombs was Flickr and wikipedia... it was damn cool to see that page expand so fast.

what was even better was that it was NEWS about the EVENT... not MESSAGES about NATIONALISM tied in with the NEWS.... know what I mean? people were just unravelling the story, not politiking... (for the most part)

[Duncan]

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it journalism. As you know journalism involves going out and gathering facts and checking sources etc... I like to call it Citizen Media because these people taking cameraphone images/video are becoming part of the media zeitgeist. Most of the people on the Wikipedia/Wikinews are just filtering facts etc as reported by other sources...

[Duncan]

That being said, this surely is the tipping point (so cliche) for this type of thing....

[dad]

Your thoughts make me think. I like that!

[Duncan]

thinking is good

i like to do it sometimes

;)

[JON]

since I was in spain at the time I had no access to TV, and I actually found out about the bombing ONLINE, no one around me had even heard about it, it was actually minutes after it happened around 9 am that i was reading some news, hit reload and it said "a bomb has gone off in london" then i followed the story like you online the rest of the morning via wikipedia, flickr, news.bbc.co.uk, and others...
this is the future. citizen media!

[Defpol]

Came back to this from digg.com.

[Elpoca]

Nice screencast. Out of curiosity, what's the background music?

[Duncan]

the music is massive attack from 100th window and its called Future Proof.

thanks for watching!

[darleen]

hey anyone seen this site http://digg.com/links/Postcard_to_support_Londoners

it has a link to a site with a very cool postcard in support of fellow londoners

[wesaturtle]

Very well done. Thank you for posting this.

[Michael Massey]

Here is a mirror of the video
http://files.filefront.com/Time_lapse_of_London;3943023;/fileinfo.html

[Duncan]

Michael thanks for the mirror but I don't think its working...

:(

[Fig]

Thanks for the movie. I'm a big fan and contributor to Wikipedia. I like the way this showed not only how quickly an encyclopedic entry can be created, but also how quickly vandalism is errased. If only life were so easaly managable!

I'm NOT afraid!

[Adam Sessler]

JUST SAW THIS ON ATTACK OF THE SHOW W00000000TTT AOTS!! PWNZ UR FACE!!! MORGAN WEBB IS MY WIFE!!

[Duncan]

i dont really know how to speak hacker

can someone translate this last comment for me?

[Shitwank]

fuck u what a load of shit

Try writing something original

[Duncan]

"shitwank"

What a perfect name you gave yourself!

[Joseph]

Nice post. Another thing you have to love about online media is that it persists much longer than the tv and radio broadcasts - just came across this today (Nov 26 2005) but it's as compelling as I imagine it was when you first posted.

[Andrew Milner]

"I've always felt there was something big and sinister going on. And I’m not part of it."
“No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everybody gets it, it's part of the shape of the Universe." From "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy"
Or as we say when leaving Japan: "So long, and thanks for all the fish."
How do Bush and Blair deal with conspiracy theories? By ignoring them. "I can't go wasting my precious time dealing with crank conspiracy theories." I got a country to run (make that ruin).
Who does that remind you off? President Robert G. Mugabue, perhaps.
The two B’s are essentially saying: "I own the police, administration, military (don’t bet the farm on that), mainstream media, judiciary, legislature, election apparatus, and soon the Internet. You think the official version is a tad implausible? What are you going to do about it?”
“We bring nothing into this world, and surely we take nothing out.” Hmm.