The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 was no more tragic for having western tourists present. But their presence did make events more immediate and understandable to people in their home countries. The practical effect that having video cameras and mobiles intended for holiday use in so many of the locations meant a lot of footage of the events that would not have otherwise been shot.
Western tourists are everywhere at the moment. On cruise ships attacked by pirates, talking with reporters on their mobiles from Mumbai, or describing what it's like in Bangkok without an airport. Are there many countries at the moment without western travellers on the ground? Will that change with the economic downturn? And does that really matter as cameras and phones get cheaper and local people in all these places have the resources to send their own stories abroad?
Is this new? I think travellers have always done this. They return home trying to explain the places that they've been, and make them real to their compatriots who've never been there. Like Herodotus returning to Greece trying to explain the pyramids. And like Herodotus they're often wrong. But they bring their subject to life.
What's new is that you can do this for the world now. And you don't need a tragedy to do it. You can blog it, you can flickr it, you can Twitter it. The only difference with being in the middle of a big news story is that more people you don't know will pay attention to it.
The BBC's dotlife blog has a post on Twitter vs the traditional media covering the Mumbai terror attacks. Twitter is a micro-blogging site, where members write something like two-line public diary entries over the course of their day and respond to the posts of others. Their #mumbai topic covered the attacks. One of Dotlife's more interesting points about Twitter's coverage was wondering Who were these people - Mumbai residents or people watching cable television in the United States? Could I trust what they were telling me about this breaking story? Many of the tweets were simply quoting reports on Indian television or the BBC.
And, of course, not only the BBC and Mumbai survivor Mark Abdell were following the progress of the attacks on their blackberries. According to Wired the gunmen were as well.
Zacha Rosen is an ancient historian by training. He has resisted the urge to cash in on this as either a teacher or a spy. He's travelled widely, if by widely one means Europe and North America. Many blogs were written on these trips, all but one of which were forgotten about halfway.
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Comments
Image Overload?
The rationale for press coverage of disasters in the developing world being lax has always been the old line; "If there's no picture there's no story".
As more and more pics of international tragedies become available, it remains to be seen whether as an audience we become more engagaed and caring or futher desensitised.
Cameras on the Ground
Well, it certainly solves the problem of access. But another big problem is one of information overload. Just because you have access to a information on the net, doesn't mean that you'll get around to using it.
And there's the practical issue (mentioned in the blog) of what sources to trust in unfamiliar cultures or countries. This last issue should be more of an issue for individual people on the net, but less of one for bigger news organisations with correspondents on the ground.
Finally, there's public interest. How do you get the public interested in the outside world? (Whether the outside world for them is the next town, the next country or the next continent.) Will they start to care if you broadcast it to them? Just because big things are happening in the world doesn't mean that people notice:
As for what I said about technology on the ground in poor countries, I think there are more mobiles in poor countries than I realise. Not least in India and Bangladesh. In Mexico Carlos Slim, one of the world's richest people, makes money off a huge majority of the country's mobile phones. And Somalia's mobile phone infrastructure has thrived, despite not having had a government.Something I'd be interested to know is how many of these mobiles have cameras. And what options people have to upload photos and videos to the net, aside from the BBC World Service.