Ugandan Riots – Citizen journalism comes of age
16 Sep
If there is one thing that we have learnt from the Buganda riots over the past weekend, it is this:
In a country where the mainstream media is at the mercy of its government, or is oblivious to what’s going on, or does not have the tools or facilities to report real-time, 24 hours a day, during a crisis, there is a serious need for unhindered, unfiltered, on-the-ground citizen journalism.
During the worst parts of the riots, there was a massive media blackout, and TV and radio stations were courting irrelevance. I could not believe that at a time when a country was burning itself to the ground, most TV stations were showing music videos, foreign news and Spanish soaps.
Some of us decided to fill in the gaps by tweeting and sharing what we were seeing and experience on the ground, and the steady Twitter stream [ #Kampala ] helped keep the world informed. Our simple and humble attempts did a much better job of providing realtime news updates than the mainstream media could. Tumwijuke [ Twitter - Blog ] and Uganda Talks [ Twitter - Blog ] especially did a fantastic job of verifying rumours and provide the in-depth journalistic expertise that citizen journalism often lacks. Rhino gave us some fantastic photos, and the Ugandan blogsphere shared their views and opinions as events unfolded. Tucked away in a tiny room at UTL, coding furiously, The 27th Comrade gave us the tools to tweet free of charge, via uganda telecom [ Twitter ].
It was scary, it was fun, it was deadly, it was beautiful.
It was in essence, a coming of age. We were seeing technology in Uganda rise up to fill a gaping void and empower social change. It was the start of something wonderful, amazing, and big.
But throughout the weekend, all I could think of was: “How can we make this better? How can we create a realtime news service that will be powered by the average user with a cellphone, a couple of SMSs and an internet connection?”
It is a question that is apparently haunting many of us, and Jon Gosier of Appfrica put up a brilliant commentary on Asynchronous Info, Disjointed Data and Crisis Reporting. In short, he was asking the big question: “How can we organise all this sporadic information coming from thousands of users and make it into something useful?”
In the comments section of that article, I made a visual suggestion for organising such a datastream, which he very kindly re-posted ( Visualizing Crisis Related Crosstalk ).
See the thing is: We have seen the power of social media in a time of crisis. We have seen how informative and powerful it can be. But most importantly, we have seen how useful it is. It is one of those things that you never know you needed until you finally get it, and then you absolutely cannot live without it.
Ushahidi (an opensource crisis mapping system) rose to the challenge during the Kenyan elections:
Ushahidi was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. We’re working to build a new platform that can be used anywhere in the world.
A few enterprising Ugandans created an Ushahidi instance at ugandawitness.net where you could see the actual locations of incidents as they occured.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. If we ever needed proof, this was it.
Of course, on the flip side, how trustworthy and effective will citizen journalism be over time? One of the questions Seth Godin ponders is this:
So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist can be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better… or worse?
I’m an optimist most of the time, but on this issue, I’m afraid I’m a realist. [ From Small is the new big - Seth Godin ]
The story still unfolds, and the #Kampala and #ugandawitness tags on Twitter will always stand tall as a testament to a time when technology, journalism, humanity’s need for social change joined forces and re-shaped the landscape of Ugandan journalism.
And for us technical adherents, the questions plague us, the urge to make something stable and robust out of this, the desire to empower the average user with the tools to create that change, one SMS a time, one photo at a time, one post at a time… one person at a time.
And at Node Six, the coding goes on, furiously.
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Rogue FM: The Dark Knight Soundtrack - Introduce a little Anarchy
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Memoirs: Thank you Abba, for getting us through this.
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Offtopic:
Standing near our taxi stage, it’s 8pm and people are crossing over with their hands up. Fire in the middle of the road.
[ solomonking ]
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It’s incredible how quickly African countries can deteriorate in chaos and anarchy. Truly if it weren’t for the Grace Of Abba, we would be in the full throws of genocide and brutal government crackdowns. Great job to everyone who contributed to the accurate reporting of the events.Can we use these same tools to foster unity and peace and progress in Africa??
We are already using these tools to foster peace and unity, through learning, through collaboration, through information dissemination.
The internet is the single most important innovation for Africa’s growth.
Sorry, Solomon. I’m going to hijack this, because it was the one to mention this issue after I had gone over the tolerance threshold. When I hijack, I prevent others from commenting, because my comments stink through the monitor. Apologies, Solomon.
Now to comment:
Unfortunately, citizen journalism is too unprofessional. Now, even professional journalists fell from the standards, but perhaps better the devil you know (that is, the devil you can arrest).
I mean, do you even begin to factor in the amounts of bias that pervaded this thing you call citizen journalism?
Did you see any pro-Museveni entries? I mean, Museveni has supporters, doesn’t he? Maybe they don’t tweet, but that is the problem. This “journalism” is so steeped in groupthink, colonised by like-minded drones who fall in the same generational group and who are more-excited about thinking alike than about thinking the situation over. And they believe that pronouncing that Museveni has “failed” or “fucked up” is somehow a heroic act that we should sit up and pay attention to, stroking our chins and wondering at the wisdom and logic that must have led to this weighty, elusive conclusion; these stupid children of these days who think that having voted someone into office somehow means that it’s paradise from here on. :-p The closest any of us alive in Uganda today ever came to paradise, ironically, is this last week.
It’s touchingly sweet of our arm-chair political philosophers to blame Museveni because some idiot has lit a tyre in the middle of the road. I see the logic, friends. I see the logic. And when the country hastens the arrival of the fibre-optic cable? Ah, that’s not the government’s credit, friends, that’s our credit.
Ugandans – especially this generation – make me want to spit at my monitor.
The predictable uniformity was annoying and disgusting. I’m with Seth Godin. The majority of people suck and suffer from huge biases and are only out to get laid, for they are merely sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, not the gods and goddesses of Truth. Most people only pretended to have passion on the issue, because, well, how else would we think they are relevant? How else would we notice them? How else will we cite them? How else will we sight them?
Most people thought that, with those broad generalisations and curt dismissals of Museveni, they were doing something brave, novel and worth listening to. In this “citizen journalism”, I learnt more about attention freaks than I did about politics. It shows that no report is so biased, so riddled with un-backed opinion, no accusation-of-a-hated-party is too outlandish to be suspect. We all just re-tweeted, myself included. (I am one of the accused, and this is my way of saying “Guilty as charged.”)
But I was glad for the #kampala hashtag. It kept me updated. Thanks, man. And I added it to Twitter UTL. You send ‘twitter #kampala’ to 2299, for example. (Or ‘Twitter #Uganda’, whatever hashtag you want.) In that wise, citizen journalism can’t be replaced. But in other cases, it’s a cancer.
(Most people forget that the media has caused four genocides for every zero it prevented.)
I was supposed to prepare a polemic filled with all the insane words I have in my book, but I have to work on Twitter UTL. Keep ‘em comin’, y’all. You never know when we’ll need it, as Wise Solomon said.
My goodness! Now that’s a proper rant!
Just so you know, I generally steer away from politics. The riot weekend was the closest I’ve ever been to being “an activist” and I made sure my tweets were as neutral as I could make them.
My post was targeted at the technology, not the political affiliations, ergo, I cannot respond to this, I shall leave it for the professionals.
But still… My goodness, what a rant! And by all means, hijack away! Hehe.
I know you were taking the piss when you said: “And when the country hastens the arrival of the fibre-optic cable? Ah, that’s not the government’s credit, friends, that’s our credit.”
That is absolutely the case. The cable came to UG not BECAUSE the gov’t did anything, it was consumer demand that led the private sector to lay that cable. The gov’t had zero hand in SEACOM happening. Uganda as a nation has no stake in TEAMS either, they put all their eggs into one (EASSy) basket, which may or may never happen.
…how trustworthy and effective will citizen journalism be over time?”
it can easily become a tool for propaganda…
When the mainstream media is under alot of scruitny, censorship and tight budgets then it becomes the role of citizen journalists. The same role is played by some journalists.
Rev, what a rant! For starters, I did not see a political agenda in the tweets I read all through the riots. Maybe it’s my fault I only follow sensible people. What I did get was news on what was happening by the minute, where was too dangerous to go and where wasn’t, and what my friends were feeling abt all this. This was citizen journalism at its best. Secondly, I used the tweets to start an argument with my dad that I won every single time the news came on. That was the best abt this citizen journalism. Heh. Now, back to the point. Of course we don’t expect this kind of news dissemination to be unbiased and accurate. If anything it can cause another genocide like radio did in Rwanda. But do we do away with it, do we discredit it? I hope not. Go on and discuss how to shape it, I’ll be listening.
PS. I got here through twitter.