Interesting four minute video from This American Life looks at how having a camera in your hand and feeling that you need to “document” an event changes people’s reactions.
This is via Paul Carr’s article at TechCrunch: NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth, which follows his article NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web.
The articles are both somewhat lengthy but worth reading as Carr thinks through how social web sites have created a pervasive attitude that if you don’t post some photos and tweets from some interesting event that occurs in your life, then “it didn’t happen.” This attitude has extended to “citizen journalism,” where people witnessing or experiencing some calamity react by pulling out their camera phone, not to dial 911, but to snap a few awesome photos to post on their web page. As Carr concludes in the Fort Hood article:
And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.
