By Christopher Mims
BALTIMORE--The first I heard of Monday's riots here was on
Facebook. In a parent group usually populated by requests for play
dates, a mom posted that violence had broken out not less than a
mile from my home. After days of peaceful protests, I was at first
incredulous. I looked out my window at the sedate cafe across the
street: Nothing out of the ordinary.
But there on Twitter, my feed was lighting up from the moment
the first rocks were thrown by teenagers, at police, in the
Mondawmin area of Baltimore. Why was this happening? How big would
it get? What should I do and/or think about it?
That's when I had a uniquely personal realization about the
power of technology in a crisis: It's easy to become jaded about
the power of social media, but it is a colossal mistake to take it
for granted.
Yes, we've heard about the power of social media many times
before--from the Arab Spring to the documentation of police
brutality all over America. But something unique is happening at
this point in history, even at what feels like a relatively mature
stage of the development of the technology. Mostly, it has to do
with the sheer density of smartphones-- 64% of Americans now own
one, and 85% of millennials do.
The result is something that we thought we had before, but I am
realizing we can never have enough of: Context.
As activists, journalists and citizens poured into the areas of
Baltimore that were being affected, news of events arrived in my
feed mere seconds after it occurred. By far the most powerful tool
of the night were Twitter lists of accounts from people who were on
the ground.
One thing that has happened in past crises covered on social
media is the rapid spread of misinformation and rumor. But now,
owing to the sheer density of people who were actually there,
distributing images, video and firsthand accounts through Twitter,
Facebook, Vine and Instagram, I saw rumors pop up and just as
quickly get smacked down in the comments.
I could tell who was actually present because they would
interact with other eyewitnesses in real time. Instagrams of
photojournalists capturing images of tear-gas choked streets would
appear before the professionals' work even hit the wires. An easily
overlooked account of the complicated genesis of the riots written
by a schoolteacher who was there went viral almost
immediately.(2b)
And then there was the video streaming Periscope, which seemed
to roar to life with a power that I think its creators, at Twitter,
had suspected but perhaps rarely witnessed. One journalist
approached the pastor of a church whose building--it was to be
affordable housing for senior citizens--was set ablaze. The raw and
fleeting power of that interview did more to make his plight real
than anything else I saw last night, and it's a shame that
Periscope still lacks the ability to archive videos for
posterity.
For decades we've heard about citizen journalism, but this was
something more: It was a sort of hive knowledge, a swarm response.
One of its more amazing expressions was that almost as soon as the
riots escalated to looting and arson, Baltimore natives started to
contextualize the violence, describing their own experiences but
also pointing at academic papers and poverty statistics. Even David
Simon, creator of The Wire, weighed in.
This morning I ventured out into my city to truth-test some of
what I'd seen only through social media last night. There were the
smashed storefronts, a torn-open ATM, heaps of trash and broken
glass. One grocery store employee outside a boarded up store told
me the main thing he'd been fending off all morning were gawkers
attempting to take pictures with their cellphones. As we talked,
more pulled up, and he politely asked them to move on.
And this, too, was a lesson. Social media's inherent narcissism
drove all those early morning commuters to swing by to grab an
image for the folks back home--Facebook's version of disaster
tourism.
More optimistically, I saw people using Facebook to organize
cleanups. By the time the sun was up the corner of North Ave. and
Pennsylvania Ave., where the worst of the rioting had occurred, was
filled with neighbors--old people, families, kids--sweeping up.
It's hard to imagine how much more frightening the chaos of last
night would have been had I not had so many firsthand accounts
immediately at my fingertips. And while the genesis of night's
riots may have been a flier spread through social media, it was
that same media that led pastors and citizens' groups to pour into
the streets almost as soon as the riots started, to try to calm the
situation. Would the Baltimore riots of 2015 have been worse
without the immediacy of social media? It's seems genuinely
possible.
Marshall McLuhan said that in the future everyone gets 15
minutes of fame, but he was half wrong. In our world, so many
people are having their 15 minutes at once that they become dots in
a pointillist portrait of an event. It's one so much more
comprehensive, and perhaps truer, than any we could achieve before.
It's only going to become more complete as our devices
proliferate.
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
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