Right now, on India’s CNN-IBN news channel, a man with the title of “citizen journalist” is interviewing people the morning after the main attack. The 2008 terrorist attacks will be known as the first reported primarily via social media. A majority of footage and accounts shown by CNN, BBC, and IBN were from citizens using cell phones cameras, text messages, Wikipedia, blogs, and Twitter. Noah Shachtman described the attacks as being described “tweet by tweet”. CNN has called yesterday “the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news gathering force to be reckoned with.” One man told CNN: “Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter”.
Particularly active was the #mumbai thread on Twitter:
lwaldal: RT many: If you are in #mumbai, give blood by smsing BLOOD [blood group] to 96000 97000, someone will call up for donation.
shahpriya: RT @schmmuck it seems that the police van that was hijacked was the one the late vijay salaskar was traveling in !!
But #mumbai was not just for reporting, Shlok Vaidya, an energy security analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, used the #mumbai channel for analysis:
#mumbai If the cargo ship is true, it was sloppy and from and old era of terrorism. Points to legacy thinkers – governments, major org etc
Ushahidi, a new project for crowdsourced crisis mapping, played no role in the reporting. Rather a mix of Wikipedia and Google Maps were the tools of choice to aggregate and track the Mumbai attacks in near real time.
These attacks prove the potential role of Ushahidi in future crises, however the events of the past 24 hours also demonstrate that Ushahidi needs to be faster and more automated to maximize its usefulness. The attacks occurred the day before Thanksgiving, making any attempt to use the system to Mumbai less likely. Furthermore, if the system took even a day to deploy, citizen journalists would have already clustered and amassed around other social media services to aggregate and map the crisis before Ushahidi could open its doors. If faster and more automated, Ushahidi could be a major aggregator of social media data during future crises.
Christopher Albon is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.
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{ 3 comments }
Excellent points about Ushahidi. Certainly there is a way to go before we will be able to react in a meaningful way to something that unfolds this quickly. There is a plan for aggregating and mapping existing social media outlets to give greater visibility to the reporting that is already happening. The aggregation approach is probably the only way to capture this kind of activity (as opposed to making people use the application.) Certainly Ushahidi will not compete with Twitter, but could use it as one of many sources. This is already in the works in my understanding.
Also, thanks for pointing out that CNN article — you should check it out again! It’s been completely rewritten today. Yesterday was celebratory bell ringing that citizen journalism has come of age, today it’s a quite negative perspective that it is just “unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies” and “an endless circle of recycled information.”
Wow Chris, good catch with the CNN article. It is entirely different today!
And you are right about the aggregator vs. single application. I think possibly a mix of both would produce the best results.
It’s been rewritten again!
Now it is largely just a review of what happened (no pronouncement of a new golden day of reporting), including flickr and google maps review. The overall tone is positive again except they left the “endless cycle of misinformation” in as the closing kicker.
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