Blogs and cell phones coverage of Virginia Tech shootings
19.04.2007
Nikolay Bachiyski
As a follow up to my earlier post entitled “what does community mean to you?”, it is interesting to see how social networking sites and blogs helped the Virginia Tech community communicate during the shootings. InformationWeek reported that day: “Virginia Tech students and staff reported on what appeared to be the deadliest shooting on a U.S. college campus as it unfolded, using blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, and cell phones to do it…A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus.”
You can see some of the blog entries posted during the time of the shooting on CollegeMedia.com, the website of the publisher of Virginia Tech’s campus newspaper. Cybersoc.com has rounded up a few shocking first hand accounts from bloggers on the traumatic events, as well as Boing Boing which also has a roundup of first-hand coverage that includes Flickr photos of police cars on the scene.
Dan Gillmor from Center for Citizen Media Blog writes: “More and more major news stories will be amplified in this way. Spot news will be, in part, a citizen-captured phenomenon, and there’s no going back.”
I think that news events being covered by citizens in this format is definitely the wave of the future and this will allow us all to further understand the power of these social tools and to record events in a more truthful and accurate manner.
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1. Larry | 25.04.2007 at 5:42
Statistically you are right that the more information we get, the more accurate the picture of events will be, i.e. the closer to the truth it will be. But statistics are just that: numbers. For it to work, we would have to get ALL the angles from ALL sources. Failing that, we will not have a completely accurate picture. Size counts – but only in theory.
As for our having a choice in whether we want to hear all the news, I disagree. We don’t have a choice – unless we shut ourselves off completely. We are assaulted all day by news. And neither do we have a choice whether to read all our emails – if they are are part of our work. They come pouring in and we have to keep on churning back answers.
2. Blonde 2.0 | 25.04.2007 at 20:18
Larry:
By reading the blog entries, podcasts, comments, and seeing the pics posted by different people, I think we are getting as much of the picture as we can and from different angles. Since you weren’t there and I wasn’t there, of course we will never know the complete truth, but then again, I rather have a few pieces of the puzzle than none at all.