Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia (and the preceding Georgian clampdown in South-Ossetia), this openDemocracy article explored whether the much-vaunted role of citizen journalism in today's age proved itself in an actual war situation. Its conclusion is mostly negative:


Summary:



To be fair, of course, this particular outpost of Europe was hardly the best place for citizen journalism to be tested. In as far as there is any promising capacity for user-generated media in Georgia, it would be in Tblisi, not in the sleepy region around Tskhinvali.

Nevertheless Morozov makes a number of good points. Especially about the role and responsibility of the mainstream, professional media. Whatever the real contributions citizen media can make, if the professional, international media start considering it as a convenient way to cut costs and abdicate their own responsibility of covering events on the ground, that's Bad News. And it would play right in the hands of the powerful.

That may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, there is a widespread notion that the corporate media are by their nature to some extent in the tank for the powers that be, and citizen or "guerrilla" media can play a role undermining the consensus. And there's good reasons for that feeling. But the case of the war in Georgia did showcase that user-generated content and citizen journalism can be easily manipulated themselves, in a myriad of ways that professional mainstream media could resist and overcome.

That's what I take from the article anyway. What about you?

The section of opendemocracy.org on media & the net has many other articles that go into the topic of citizen journalism etc as well; do check it out.