Random Acts of Journalism

London - Spy Capital of the World

2009-03-02T01:27:00.000-08:00

Westminster's CCTV cameras are seen as evidence of UK's Surveillance society says the Guardian.

Here are a few snippets from article:

1. The cameras rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year.
2. This provides a hi-tech version of the Panopticon. This was originally conceived by Jeremy Bentham as a form of surveillance for prisoners in the 18th century. The theory behind this was that if prisoners knew they could be caught doing something wrong at any time, they would have to always maintain correct behavior, as they can never know when they are being monitored.
3. 6000 officials from 30 countries have come to learn lessons from the centre - Brazil, US, China, South Africa, Japan and Mexico among them.
4. behind code-protected entrance reached through tunnels deep in the underground beneath Picadilly Circus are 49 CCTV monitors appear with snippets of all of London Life.

Read full article here, and follow the debate on the erosion of civil liberties here. Read the response to the Omand report about intellifence gathering here, also today's Guardian.

Gadgets which collect information

2008-09-16T01:09:00.000-07:00

Surveillance

Surveillance, Sousveillance, self-surveillance. All three types of watchdog behaviour are at an all time high. This is to be expected with the ever-increasing proliferation of surveillance type technologies.

If citizen journalism is really just the cutting out of the middle man, then surveillance technologies are exactly the tool to do the cutting. Mapping, CCTV, and our very own mobile phones are tools with which we are able to gather information and share it with others without a journalist or reporter to collate and synthesize this information. Surveillance technologies are also used to simply gather information in its most traditional and army-related sense, such as these RSI technologies in this Washington Post article.

"ISR" has become the new silver bullet in counterinsurgency. It stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, but it really means a series of new sensors and other electronic collection and analytic gadgets. It also includes the manned and unmanned airborne platforms from which they primarily operate.

Last July, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates approved shifting more than $1 billion to ISR programs from other fiscal 2008 Pentagon budget accounts. In detailing the reprogramming request to congressional committees, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England wrote, "These funds are being made available for ISR based on the view of the Secretary of Defense that the ISR effort is a higher priority and needs to be addressed at this time."

Surveillance technologies are so deeply ingrained in the technology of everyday life that we self-surveill to share it with friends - see this article on Fitbit, a company which has created surveillance technology in the form of a pedometer.

"The simple pedometer has been given a makeover. Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person's movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of her steps taken, her calories burned, and even the quality of her sleep. Data is wirelessly uploaded to the web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends.

James Park, cofounder of Fitbit, says that one of the main goals was to make the sensor so small that it will go unnoticed no matter what a person is wearing. The device can be put in a pocket, attached discretely to a bra, or slipped into a special wristband during sleep. It is meant to be worn 24-7, and each device can run for 10 days on a single battery charge. Park demonstrated the Fitbit device in San Francisco on Tuesday at the Techcrunch50 conference, a popular launch pad for new technology companies.

Self-surveillance in the form of wirelessly uploading your activity is not citizen journalism, and neither is more traditional defense surveillance in the form of ISR technologies. However, particularly with fitbit, it is the usability of complicated surveillance technology for everyday purposes that is particularly interesting. In the same way that surveillance has moved from 50 years ago cameras recording movements were used only in military or high security areas to everyday 24/7 CCTV use, these just-for-fun surveillance technologies such as fitbit indicate just how ingrained surveillance and self-surveillance have become into everyday life.

2008-08-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11424_3-10002829-90.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News.comDailyPodcast

Talking about LAPD, the Zapruder film and the developments of citizen journalism to fly past the gatekeepers.

YouTube as a platform for justice.

Distributed acts of journalism and journalistic acts of distribution

2008-05-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

He goes on a bit, but its very interesting and relevant points about the transfer of power through networked distribution and the swift swing of power from gatekeepers - i.e. mainstream media - print and television editors, producers, programmers, writers - to the people who publish information directly onto a website as a part of an overall conversation being had.

Citizen film-making

2008-04-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

Spike Lee and Nokia have teamed up to create a film using User Generated Content produced by Nokia users on their cell phones. The project is fascinating - but note that Citizen Journalism is not mentioned once. The same technologies which allow for citizen journalism are also allowing for 21st century (or is that post-post modern) film -making. This is trend developing as we saw with Cloverfield. On this project, Spike says he likes working with people who have talent but are not in film school, a similarity with 'Citizen Journalists' who have talent but are not classically trained journalists.

Lights. Camera. Cellphone Action.

By LAURA M. HOLSON

Published: April 24, 2008

Who says cellphones are good only for talking? Today they are bringing together two unlikely brand names: Nokia and Spike Lee.

Spike Lee will assess the video, music, photos and text material created by consumers with their cellphones, then help assemble the various snippets into a three-part film.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The director is teaming up with Nokia to make a film using videos created with cellphones.

Mr. Lee, the director, is teaming up with Nokia, the cellphone maker, to direct a short film comprising YouTube-style videos created by teenagers and adults using their mobile phones.

By hiring Mr. Lee for the project, Nokia is seeking to combine the populist appeal of user-generated content with the power of a famous director’s pedigree. The film will have three acts, each three to five minutes long, with the theme loosely based on the concept of humanity.

“I’m interested because it’s a great collaborative effort,” Mr. Lee said. “Within five years, new movies will be made with devices like these.”

He added: “I like working with people who have talent but aren’t in film school.”

The project is an experiment for Mr. Lee, but it is also a way for Nokia to promote its wares. Cellphone companies are all trying to position their products not just as devices for talking, but as multimedia devices that can play music, search the Web and capture video.

Many companies are also preparing for a new wave of mobile entertainment, as social networking on sites like MySpace and Facebook migrates from the Web to cellphones.

Nokia in particular is trying to turn itself into an entertainment-friendly company, much the way Steven P. Jobs has changed Apple’s image with the iPod and iPhone.

Nokia, based in Finland, said it surveyed 9,000 consumers last year and concluded that by 2012 one out of every four consumers will create, edit or share entertainment with friends, instead of getting it from traditional media outlets like television or movie studios.

And that, Nokia executives said, led them to seek out a movie director willing to dabble in mobile video.

“This is not a marketing gimmick,” said Craig Coffey, Nokia’s vice president for North American marketing and a former PepsiCo executive. “The notion of social networking and entertainment is real.”

There have been several other efforts in the realm of films that were shot with or meant to be viewed on phones. Most have involved independent filmmakers or young Steven Spielbergs in training. In 2006 Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute announced a partnership with the largest wireless association in Europe to sponsor five short films for mobile viewers. They were created by, among others, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who directed the Academy Award winner “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Early last year, Paris held its own mobile film festival for novice filmmakers, sponsored by the French mobile operator SFR. Similar festivals have been held in Hong Kong and Yokohama, Japan.

John Stratton, the chief marketing officer of Verizon Communications who works closely with media companies to offer content to customers, said he did not expect films shot on phones to become their own genre. “But the notion of shared media is powerful,” he said.

That is one reason Nokia chose to exploit the social networking possibilities of mobile phones. Contributors can upload material created with their phones — video, music, photos and text — to www.nokiaproductions.com for review by Mr. Lee and assistant directors who will help revise entries. Mr. Coffey said other site visitors will be able to peruse these and combine them with their own material to make something new.

Mr. Lee, who in recent years directed “Inside Man” and the documentary series “When the Levees Broke,” conceded that he will be in unfamiliar technological terrain.

“Me, I’m personally a dinosaur,” he said. “My children have to help me turn on the television.”

During an interview Mr. Lee corrected himself twice, remembering that he was supposed to call the cellphone a “mobile device.”

Mr. Lee said he would assess the submissions to the site and even write a blog giving young filmmakers advice. “We want people to send sounds, music, maybe a baby crying in the park,” he said.

And if thousands of aspiring Spike Lees show up seeking feedback on their work? “I can only do so much; I have a full-time job,” he said. Then he added: “We’ll manage.”

During the months-long project, visitors to the site will be asked to vote for their favorite videos for each of the film’s three acts. After that Mr. Lee will pick a winner for each act and edit them into the final film, which will have its premiere next fall in Los Angeles.

The film will also be available for viewing online, but Nokia has yet to work out one important detail: which carriers will distribute it to viewers on mobile phones. Nokia hasn’t found anyone yet. Sounding like a hopeful Hollywood producer, Mr. Coffey said, “I’m optimistic.”

Surveilling the Surveillers Part II

2008-02-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

Set within a wider context, Citizen Journalism is one of the more positive symptoms of a surveillance society. While the Chicken or the Egg controversy of whether citizens have adopted the new technology because they feel the need to surveill (social determinism) or if the new technology has caused the adoption of this further shift toward a surveillance society (technologial determinism) are essentially two sides of the same 2-pound coin of a surveillance society. The article below, a simple story of bikers getting revenge on London's cycle-unfriendly drivers by choosing to purchase helmet-cams, indicates the extent of the saturation of surveillance, and just how deeply ingrained society's belief in the power of surveillance is. New recording/surveillance technology allows for the video documentation of injustice. The citizens have adopted this technology not to create a citizen journalist expose on cycle-unfriendly streets of the nation's capital (which would be pretty groundbreaking and cool). The helmet cams were intially used to record trips down the hill for extreme skiing/snowboarding footage, and the usage has 'crept' over to recording injustice against those of us who, quite rightly, should have at least the right to a safe trip to work. Livingstone's super-cycle highways to come in 2010 might well render these helmets for bikers obsolete. But society's belief in recorded evidence has caused us all to take part in the surveillance of others, who themselves are also probably surveillers as well.

Surveilling the Surveillers

2008-02-21T00:45:00.001-08:00

Here is a headline and an article in the Evening Standard from 20 February 2008 that has caught my eye...explanation to come later...

Cycle-cam shames drivers on YouTube

Mark Prigg, Science Correspondent
20.02.08

London cyclists are investing in helmet-mounted cameras to record their daily commute, so they have video evidence against careless drivers if they are knocked off and hurt.

A website selling the cameras, which cost between £80 and £500, said sales had tripled in the last year.

Increasing numbers of angry cyclists have uploaded clips to video sharing sites such as YouTube in a bid to shame offending drivers.

"We originally started selling these to snowboarders and mountain bikers," said Sab Jhooti of www.actioncameras.co.uk. "However, we found people have been using them to record their ride into work, and cyclists now account for the bulk of our sales."

The small cameras clip onto a rider's helmet. To view the footage cyclists put a memory card into a PC or connect the camera via a cable.

Andy Barrett, 36, a software engineer who commutes from Heathrow to Staines every day, has worn a helmet camera for almost two years. "It gives me a sense of security. I've uploaded almost 60 videos of my incidents to YouTube," he said.

Click here for article and the clips from the biker's helmet.

Yahoo! You Witness New Analysis

2008-01-10T00:34:00.000-08:00

Just what exactly is this citizen journalism thing anyway? If I had just landed on planet Earth from the distant planet of I-Promise-I'm-Not-a-Sci-Fi-Freak, and I were to look at the way Yahoo! handles 'citizen journalism', today on Yahoo!'s You Witness News section I would find this:

Featured Videos –

Raw video: Moose on the loose

Raw video: Truck on fire in Chicago

Raw video: Firefighting plane lands on lake

Raw video: Wildfire spreads over hill

You Witness Photos

Samples:

Pictures 1-17: Political pictures from Iowa/New Hampshire caucuses (Caucusi?)

Picture 18: Men examine a car burned by angry protesters in Hyderabad, Pakistan on December 28 after the assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister “Benazir Brutto”.

Picture 41: Santa Clause makes an appearance at Patna Women's College in Patna, India on December 20

Picture 49: The entrance to the Iowa Public Television studios is lined with campaign signs as the4 station prepares to air the Democratic Debates on December 13 in Johnston, Iowa.

Picture 193; A group of protesters in Los Angeles, CA demonstrate against martial law in Pakistan on November 9.

Pictures 265-410 – California wildfires, burned tress/houses/firefighters

Picture 308: The October 24 San Diego sunrise is a dramatic deep red after days of wildfires raged through the city and surrounding areas

Picture 309: The coast of Carlsbad, CA is covered in thick black smoke on October 22, a reminder of the wildfires raging in nearby San Diego.

Featured slideshows:

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida

A man wearing a costume imitating al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden holds a mock assault rifle as he dances during New Year rituals in Comanesti, 300 kilometers north of Bucharest, Romania, Sunday Dec. 30 2007. In pre-Christian rural traditions, dancers wearing colored costumes or animal furs, toured from house to house in villages singing and dancing to ward off evil. With the average income in Romania, which joined the European Union in 2007, at around 200 euros ($US 295) a month and much lower in rural areas, the tradition has moved to Romania's cities where dancers travel to perform the ritual for money. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

See that up there? It’s an AP photo! In fact, they are all AP photos. Either, these slideshows have been tossed on the You Witness page for lack of space on other pages, or the images become property of AP the minute the ‘citizen journalist’ uploads/hands over the image to Yahoo (or CNN, or BBC, or or or). Note to self: find that out.

Top Stories Photos

Airline Secuirty (11 photos) – Interesting, though wrongly titled

Hurricane Katrina (8 Photos)

Ground Zero (5 photos)

Homeland Secuirty (33 photos)

Most recommend photos (32 photos)

Re-Launch Inspiration

2008-01-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

An unkown prof had this feedback to give on my dissertation.

“This is an impressive piece of work – just for the sheer labour it contributes significantly to debates about citizen journalism. It is an exhaustive account of its topic covering a wide range of case studies while also giving a useful overview of the relevant literature. The argument around citizen journalism as a form of surveillance was excellent 0 but I thought it could have been brought in earlier and used to structure the dissertation. The full implications of citizen/surveillance is not fully developed – but you wouldn’t necessarily expect this at this stage. Clearly this could be developed into a DPhil.”

Hence re-launch. Turns out, I am not meant to be a clerical worker forever!

Re-Launch

2008-01-07T23:47:00.000-08:00

Re-Launch of Random Acts of Journalism 2008

A New Year's resolution? Not quite. A preference to watching paint dry til my eyes bleed at work? *Sheepishly* Perhaaaps. Genuine interest in subject matter? Absolutely.

Whether or not relaunch is the right word for a blog that took of with a thunderous thud is indeed debatable, of course, but the goals of RAJ have changed.

RAJ was to be a sounding board for my dissertation, to encourage participation by others in order to create a truly comprehensive account of the current state of citizen journalism and nail down a definition of the term 'Citizen Journalism' itself. Of course, once I went from gingerly poking a toe into the pool of quicksand to actually jumping in, TDI (Total Dissertation Immersion) occured, and, with sand up to and over my head, I laid in the (exfoliating) bath of dissertationness until September 1st. At this time, my fist punched through the sand Mario Bros style, and I shot out of sandy dissertationville, shedding the TDI and landed (with very nicely exfoliated skin) onto a soft and cuddly pile of 'holy sh** reality' and began my calmly desperate search for a job with my shiny new Masters degree in, erm, MEDIA. I got me one of them there jobs working in THE MEDIA and have been treading water ever since, using absolutely nothing that I learned during the most intellectually enlightening and academically exciting years of my life. While the position of 'assistant' entails a mindblowingly plentiful variety of ways of 'assisting', really, the position of assistant hammers your intellect out of you, requires absolutely nothing from you that someone else can't do exactly, deflates your confidence and shatters your hopes and dreams. Back up, back up, it's not so extreme, mind you, and in some ways motivates me to work even harder to prove myself.

Aaaaanyway, there I was, plugging along in my life as a clerical assistant in the field of MEDIA, when I received a very special letter in the mail, from my university. I had heard a month before that I had indeed secured my A- on my dissertation and therefore would be graduating with a distinction. This had made me proud of course, but it seemed like ages ago that I had suffered from TDI, and I felt almost as unconnected from my lifestyle as a cool, international media academic filled with the hope of changing my career and working in something exciting such as documentary filmmaking or guerilla citizen journalism. Upon reading my dissertation feedback, however, I remembered that this office gig is temporary, and that my interest in the area of citizen journalism never ever disappeared at all.

Therefore, the goals of this website are as follows:
1. Re-immerse myself in the area of citizen journalism
2. Continue to develop my theories of the phenomenon of citizen journalism as a sympton of an ever-emerging surveillance society.
3. Monitor the continuously changing concept of 'citizen journalism' as it develops within the mainstream media on websites such bbc.co.uk, yahoo.com,, etc etc
4. Participate in symphony of voices on the subject of citizen journalism and also all participatory media, including social media.
5. Plug back in to the academic world of the MEDIA instead of trying to swim the backstroke in the puddle that is my real life in the 'media' as a PR assistant.

Those are my goals. They may change, grow, re-focus. But there they are damn it. I am ready to kayak through the rapids of the 'MEDIA' I know and care a bit more about. I've got my paddle, my helmet, shiny Masters tucked into my pocket, and it's time to push off while my skin is still so nicely exfoliated!

Citizen Journalism Defined?

2007-06-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Defining Citizen Journalism

“Citizen journalism” has become a contemporary buzz word. A search in Google for the phrase brings up 1,330,000 results, with 754 results in its “news” search engine. Similarly, “Citizen Journalist” brings up 336,000 results, with 54 results in the news section. A quick look beyond those search results, however, indicates that what one person or group may define as a citizen journalist differs strikingly to how others define the same term. Therein lies the challenge. The term “citizen journalism” has become a label representative of a wider trend of a shift in the media in general. The image of the “citizen journalist” conjures up an image of a technologically-savvy person with a citizen journalist toolkit of sorts, filled with a mobile phone with a camera, a digital camera, broadband access to the internet and usually a blog onto which the images are uploaded.

Behind these terms and the images that are conjured up, however, there are varying definitions of what a citizen journalist is and what citizen journalism in fact entails.

The Term > The Label

The term “citizen journalism” has been defined in many ways. The following definition by Bowman & Willis in We Media define citizen journalism as the act of citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information." In a general sense, this covers all forms of citizen journalism in existence today. It is a very over-used term because it ends up being used to describe various interactive tools and communities, rather than the much more elsive examples of actual citizen reporting.

When removing the politically charged label of the “citizen”, the trend is currently being labeled in many other ways:

A handful of these terms, like grassroots media, we media, user-generated content (referred to from this point on as UGC) and participatory media, define this trend in terms of the organic nature in which the phenomenon empowers the people to report news independently of the mainstream media. Other terms such as personal and individual media are often used when referring to the growing use of blogs to publish personal information on the web.

Terms such as networked journalism, participatory journalism and open-source journalism indicate a shift in the relationship between the public and the mainstream news outlets, whereby the public is now thought to be “part of the conversation”.

The term “citizen journalist” is equally laden with the political implications of an often apolitical act of uploading images, is similarly being renamed:

Witness contributor
Eyewitness
Citizen Journalist
Bloggers
People who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time
People committing Random Acts of Journalism

Terms like citizen journalists and bloggers (both in a much more acute sense of the word) are used to define people who cover serious new events in their blogs, contribute well-backed comments to the blogs of others and usually blog within a network of credible bloggers on the same topic. Witness contributor, eyewitness, people in the wrong place at the right time, and people creating random acts of journalism represent a different type of person under the umbrella of “citizen journalist”. These terms imply that this type of citizen journalist is similar to the way that the public has traditionally tended to interact with the media by making eyewitness reports to journalists entrusted to compiling and constructing the complete story through many pieces of eyewitness contributions in addition to official reports, providing a greater context to the story.

While this last set of terms seems to refer to simply a glorified eyewitness of generations past, it is exactly this understanding of the term citizen journalist and citizen journalism that has been adopted by the mass media and therefore reaches a mass audience. These citizen journalists participate in mainstream media through forms such as comments on blogs run by mainstream media outlets, emails to the editors, and by sending in images they have taken and deem in some way newsworthy. This last aspect of citizen photojournalism is the focus of this paper.

It is not to be understood that this type of participation is in any way less relevant than some of the grassroots journalism and serious blogs in existence today. Admittedly, many of the hundreds of photos sent in to mainstream media on a daily basis are family and vacation photos. This should not detract, however, from the fact that people are participating on a grand scale in a much larger capacity than ever before. On the contrary, the public’s unprecedented level of participation in the media is exactly why “citizen journalism” is the buzzword it is today. As explained by Yochai Benkler, its significance lies in that “the capacity to make meaning – to encode and decode humanly meaningful statements – and the capacity to communicate one’s meaning around the world are held by, or readily available to, at least many hundreds of millions of users around the globe.”

The question is - what effect is this widespread uploading of images onto websites really having on restructuring the news?

Dan Gillmor's Citizen Journalism presentation at the BBC

2007-06-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend a fascinating presentation given by Dan Gillmor at the BBC that was extremely useful for my presentation.

The most interesting aspects of this presentation were unfortunately not relevant to what I am writing about, but the dissertation itself took a definite direction after Gillmor's presentation and a quick but highly informational chat with Robin Hamman.

Gillmor discussed disruption in the field of journalism and that journalism has indeed become a more democratic medium as a result of the growing trend of citizen jouralism. The three key areas of this democratization of journalism comes from Participation of the public in the media, citizen production of news itself, and democratized access to news and information. Access, he remarked, is the key idea, straying away from the traditional concept of media distribution.

There is now a two way communication which exists between the media and the citizen media, whereby consumers are simultaneously producers, and as producers, the public are also collaborators in a shift to a type of journalism Gillmor now prefers to name a conversation between the people and the media. The key to this shift is now engaging the "former audience" as collaborators in collecting news.

Gillmor pointed to images of the Jakarta bombing uploaded onto Flickr, Adam Stacey's canonical image of 7/7, the response to Senator Allen's Macaca comment during his run for 2006 senate reelection, etc. These images and clips are proven citizen journalism that have a loud voice within the mainstream media.

Additionally interesting was Gillmor's presentation of the history of citizen journalism, and its current relevance due to the proliferation of mobile photographic technologies. The Kennedy assassination images were caught by one man and his camera, Rodney Kings as well, in spite of the era of the 90s when handheld camcorders had reached a mass market. Gillmor further urged us to image if, just 6 years ago, the level of citizen journalism were on par with that today, how the citizen journalist images of 9/11 may have changed our understanding of that event.

As the last really relevant part of his presentation in terms of the topic I am exploring, Gillmore highlighted some of the gray areas as of yet unclear in this unfolding trend of citizen journalism.

If a journalist blogs, is that journalism? If an NGO blogs, is that journalism? What about corporate newsmaking? Is that journalism or PR? As this phenomenon is current and as of yet remains undefined and ever-changing it is extremely interesting to explore these questions.

Completely irrelevant but also extremely interesting were the highlighting of other types of citizen journalism that seem to cut the journalist out all together, such as mapping and crowdsourcing, in addition to demanding that it is the responsibility of the media themselves need to be teaching media literacy to the public that is living in a media-saturated environment.

The mapping that Gillmor discussed (Gillmor's own Dopplr, Jay Rosin's Assignment Zero, the local mapping of potholes in California, the mapping of real estate prices, the San Diego Disaster Response Scenario, Gentility Neighborhood Mapping Center out of New Orleans) indicates that there exists now a type of citizen reporting happening using very crude technologies that will later be greatly approved upon with the help of GPS technologies. As I said, mapping cuts out the role of the journalists and the citizens do their own reporting of local issues that then expressed directly to the bureaucracy that deals with such problems.

I couldnt help but look skeptically upon this when GIllmor then later expressed that he is absolutely appauled at the proliferation of and acculturation to CCTV here in the UK. One minute Gillmor was touting mapping and the next poo pooing surveillance. But the technologies (crude as they are now) being developed to strenghten these citizen journalism projects lend themselves to a different kind of surveillance, and lays the groundwork for a type of survieillance from inside the web outwards in coming years.

Question: Are there two types of surveillance? Is there surveillance for safety and surveillance as voyeurism? Gillmor spoke of liberty vs the good of the people. I ask the same as he, perhaps as a fellow american. CCTV cameras cover essentially your entire step from the moment you leave your front door til you return again at night. But CCTV records in order to penalise for a crime, but the bombers still terrorized the great city of London regardless of the presence of CCTV. What are the implications of a surveillance society?

Issues in Citizen Journalism

2007-06-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

Citizen Journalism...The current buzzword of all buzzwords in new media and journalism related areas. And here I sit, writing my dissertation day in and day out, realizing every day that the rabbit hole goes much deeper than I could have imagined as I began this paper a month ago.

It is for this reason that I have decided to limit my exploration of the topic to the concept of "citizen photojournalism" and its implications.

The title of my topic again is:

Citizen journalism: Reconfiguration or further commodification of the news? An analysis of the development of “citizen journalism” since the 7/7 London bombings

The dissertation will focus on “citizen journalism”, most specifically on citizen photojournalism, as I am interested in mainstream media’s early and overwhelmingly positive adoption of citizen journalism and the resulting quick-to-form relationship between mainstream media and telcos. The visual image aspect of citizen journalism, as opposed to other forms of citizen journalism, i.e. blogging, is also the focus as the dissertation seeks to remain outside the area of indie or activist media and instead focus solely on the “chance” eye-witness citizen journalism, the relationship of people to their mobile phones, the media environment which facilitates a trend like citizen journalism, and the apparent eagerness of mainstream media to integrate specifically mobile/digicam-related citizen journalism into pre-existing structures and lines of communication.

A close examination of this phenomenon in relation to the 7 July 2005 London bombings will provide a framework within which multiple layers of positive and negative aspects of citizen journalism can be explored along with the effects of this particularly relevant event in the explosion of the buzzwords “citizen journalism”.

Further subtopics within the paper will most likely be concerned with questions such as economic motivation in journalism, discussion of the importance that the image takes on in our shared experience – and how citizen journalism may both affect and be affected by this, and a thorough examination of democracy, power structures and how citizen journalism fits into these structures.

These are the initial ideas concerning the paper. In the posts that follow I will most likely explore points of my dissertation piece by piece, and hope to spur a bit of public debate about these issues in order to come to conclusions at the forefront of this very current and very relevant debate.

The following are a few quotes and links that I find interesting in these initial stages of my writing:

Richard Sambrook's sentiments in response to 7/7:
"Our reporting on this story was a genuine collaboration, enabled by consumer technology – the camera phone in particular – and supported by trust between broadcaster and audience. And the result was transformational in its impact: we know now that when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership."

Jeff Jarvis declares, "I have said before that since 9/11, I have carried a camera with me every day. There were scenes from the disaster that live only in my memory; I could not share them. But more important, I think it is important to get the street-level, eye-witness perspective of the news. The world saw 9/11 from rooftops a few miles away: It was gigantic, beyond human scale. It looked very different on Church Street. What if many of us had shared what we saw as we saw it? How would our view of that event have changed? Live, distributed news gathering and sharing will change the news more radically than we can yet imagine."

The following comment posted in the comments section of a BBC article on the subject holds water as well, representing an interesting question of why people in the moment of tragedy decide to take out their mobile phones and become "citizen journalists" at all:

"The idea that people will have the number of a paper or TV station alongside the emergency services number is bone-chilling. Shouldn't they be helping? My God I fret about the future. "

Question number 2:

Will the face of news be radically reformed? Or is "citizen journalism" a current hype?

Introductions

2007-06-11T01:02:00.001-07:00

This doesn't sound like mindless, boring, gettin-to-know-you chit chat...

I will keep this one short and simple. Fancy and lengthy introductions will come with time, as we get to know each other better. Today I set for you my purpose in being here. It is quite simple.

Below I have written the title of my dissertation. I am doing an MA in Media and Culture Studies at the University of Sussex. I have become so completely obsessed with the idea of citizen journalism and all of its possibilities and implications. I have created this space here in order to join an ongoing conversation on citizen journalism that exists on blogs throughout the internet, like those of jeff jarvis, robin hamman, martin stabe, and dan gillmor, among others.

My title:

Citizen Journalism: Reconfiguration or further commodification of the news. An anlysis of the phenomenon since the 7/7 London bombings.

I am interested in how this trend is related to market-driven journalism, surveillance in a post-surveillance society, media ethics, the power of the image and the role of the public in journalism today.

My goal: I am genuinely interested in creating a qualitative, comprehensive definition of citizen journalism, and, in so doing, defining and re-labeling the current trend that the mass media has (mis)labelled citizen journalism. The paper focuses on the (photo) journalism sent in by the public to television news stations throughout the UK on 7/7 and directly after, though many examples from the events of the Virginia tech shootings, the Tsunami, and also Columbine shootings, Rodney King beating and others will be used to support ideas in the paper.

So, question number one:

Its an easy conversation starter, but as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction says, "This doesnt sound like the usual, mindless boring gettin to know you chit chat. Sounds like you actually have something to say!"

Is there a difference between the grassroots blogging taking place on the internet vs the "citizen journalism" that took place on 7/7 and other major events? Are these random acts of (photo)journalism even journalism at all?

My 2 cents: When I began researching this topic, I definitely understood the images sent in to the BBC and Sky News, as well as those uploaded onto Flickr and MoBlog to be citizen journalism at its finest. Now, however, after speaking to some of the ciizen journalists themselves, as well as trained professional journalists, neither the journalists nor those labelled citzen journalists seem to consider themselves to be citizen journalists at all. This is why I wonder why the label "citizen journalist" was ever given in the first place and how it stuck.

Vincent Vega replies to Mia over his bloody-as-hell steak and vanilla Coke, "well, well. I do...I do." I hope you do too. Id like to hear your 2 cents...

Jessica