According to ITNews Australia
Within moments after the four explosions shook London's transportation system -- killing more than 50 and wounding hundreds more -- users began pooling photographs on Flickr, a photo-sharing site and service that lets people tag pictures with comments and labels
But it wasn't just quantity, it was also quality. I pointed earlier to the Flickr Pool 77 Community but there's more with the police asking for people to supply any cellphone pics or video of the day because they might contain clues. There was even the smart user who videoed what was happening inside the train but had the presence of mind to shoot a few frames of their watch to confirm the time.
It seems to me that within a couple of years, cellphone cameras have become an almost ubiquitous tool and that people are using them almost constantly to document their lives in ways that even digital cameras don't enable.
The fact that the photos began flowing to Flickr within moments is telling. It means that all these people already had accounts, knew how to post from their phones and, most importantly, knew about tags.
Caterina Fake, a co-founder of Flickr says "One of the things that really made sharing possible was our adding tags last year," said Fake. "Prior to that you would have to depend on someone linking to photos from an outside source."
[...] "I think this is just part of the continuum of personal publishing and user-contributed content," said Fake. "These photographs were contributed by regular people.
And there's something else. With all those photos being taken and organised and evaluated at such high speed, the iconic stuff appears very quickly. It took years for the iconic photo of Vietnam to appear. For my money there are two, the one of Kim Phuc, fleeing her village after a napalm attack and Eddie Adams, photo of the execution of a Vietcong suspect.
But the iconic photo of the London bombings was almost instant. I think it is probably this one which, to me, tells the whole story of terrorism in western society in the 21st century. It looks like something out of alien, it would have been very similar to the inside of parts of the twin towers as New Yorkers tried to get to the street and safety through smoke and dust and asbestos, but it is also a look into our collective state of mind in these bizarre times. I think it resonates with the way a lot of people are thinking and will haunt us for a long time.
From an information economy angle, however, I think this is the one. The cooler light temperature is more like an IT environment, the lights clearly converge at some unknowable point in the future to which we are all heading.
But the key to it is inside the little square at the lower left. While these people are staggering through the gloom and confusion in the aftermath of the most terrifying event most of them have experienced, having clambered over the dead and the dying, through shattered metal and now wandering among the rats and debris towards an invisible light at the end of the tunnel, two people simultaneously, think to record the event. I'd even bet that the second photo records the cellphone taking the first photo.
That, to me, tells a huge tale about where we are and where we are going with this revolution. It will be recorded, it will be networked and it will be shared from the depths.
It will be interesting to see what BagNews makes of it.
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