Following the carnage in Mumbai, the use of new technology was central to our understanding of the event.
After my recent talk at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre, in which I discussed the growing role of alternative news sources to challenge the increasingly myopic and desperately under-resourced mainstream media, a blogger at Harvard’s Law School continues this train of thought:
He [Loewenstein] suggested that blogs have a role to play in reducing the spin and distorted perspective not only of manipulative government mouthpieces, but also of the mainstream media as well.
It seems to me that something similar could be said of twittering in Mumbai. Citizen journalists can free us of the editorial lens inevitably a part of any major news source (whether liberal, conservative, philo-American or not, and so on). Indeed, to approximate reporting facts as nakedly as possible requires the rich and instant global connectivity which only the Internet can provide. Our picture of how events develop and conclude will be immeasurably complicated (but also enriched) by the dozens of individual perspectives writing news as it happens, clicking photos and, of course, twittering.
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