I wouldn’t mind hitting the streets with
a body cam myself. That would knock out the occasionally time-consuming burden
of rooting around my bag for my phone. And then fiddling with the phone for
many seconds before it’s ready to record.
Speaking of that
phone, I’ve been glued to it since last Wednesday, following the chain of
events in Ferguson, Missouri on Twitter. If you’ve only kept up via newspaper
articles and TV news segments, you don’t know the half of it. The most thorough
and up-to-date coverage is on Twitter, by way of briefings, quotes (from peaceful
protesters, unruly protesters, peaceful cops, unruly cops), photos, and videos
provided by on-the-ground journalists and community representatives.
I’m sleeping
like someone waiting for her 9-month-pregnant best friend’s water to break. Everything
else (my day job, drafting this blog post, communications having nothing to do
with Ferguson) feels like a bothersome distraction from my moment-to-moment
updates. The past two nights’ tweeted material has left my stomach in knots,
while making me wish I stuck with journalism.
As a campus news
reporter the first two years of college, I liked year #1, tolerated year #2,
and resigned not many weeks into year #3. I didn’t love my editors and most
stopped speaking to me after I quit (including the one who once asked to see my
inhaler, put it in her mouth, and took a puff before handing it back and strolling
away, as if we knew each other like that), giving me an aggressive version of
the silent treatment each time we crossed paths. But I liked interviewing
people, overhearing people, recording their words, listening to explanations of
why they think the way they do, sorting it all out into a narrative. That’s one
way to become more capable of understanding more than one side of an issue.
The reporters risking their lives (probably for very little money) to show and tell the world what’s really happening in Ferguson have been tear gassed, threatened with assault rifles, arrested and released without charges. With respect for them all, I’ve developed a particular fondness for the front-liners I’ve mainly followed this week: the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery, USA Today’s Yamiche Alcindor, freelance journalist Amy K. Nelson, the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly, and BuzzFeed’s Joel D. Anderson, who don’t look much older than 30.
I was startled when I first realized, during the Arab Spring, how important Twitter can be to social activism. This is a tool that was not available to my generation. I had always thought of Twitter--if I thought of it at all-- as chit-chat put out by celebrities to increase their following. Totally silly. But now it is a revelation to find that Twitter can be so extraordinarily important to our own society, and a tool for social change. May its power increase.
ReplyDelete