Citizen Media Sharing at a Crossroads

Pinterest! It’s all the rage, right? I’m doing it. He’s doing it. She’s doing it. Everybody, it seems from the media coverage over the past few weeks, has signed up for the photo-sharing website where users curate a “virtual pinboard.” It’s a simple concept, really: a combination of the Facebook “like” feature and Tumblr. Delightful to look at and easy to use.

“New media” certainly keeps delivering interesting products. That much is for sure. But wasn’t it just yesterday when we were fawning over Tumblr itself? When it was just becoming en vogue for politicians and companies to adopt a Twitter handle? When you just had to secure an invitation to Google+?

The world of citizen journalism seems to be facing the same trends. Where the iconic conflict-related viral images and videos of “yesteryear” were shared via Twitpic and YouTube (think Egypt’s “girl in the blue bra” from December’s police crackdown), today witnesses to revolution have a plethora of hosting options for their media contributions. Lulu Live, a Pinterest clone curated by the Middle East Voices news site, launched last week to feature videos of Bahraini government violence. CrowdVoice is similar but targeted towards the entire region. Both want to serve as a platform for media exchange during trying times. And these two, thanks to grant monies and tech development initiatives, almost assuredly won’t be the last of their kind.

But is increased competition to YouTube and Facebook-hosted content what Arab Spring-type movements really need? When there are more options for where “groundbreaking” media is reposited, doesn’t that just result in an obfuscation of content discovery? While we may have been all over +1ing things last Fall, how often have we actually heard of videos or images shared on that platform “going viral”? Really, now.

Citizen journalists, of the type much lauded by pretty much everyone, obviously think their content needs to be viewed. It is, after all, the need-to-see video and images from places where few AP crews would dare to go. So why jeopardize it on a site which, even in addition to a second-rate UI, could be easily thrown offline by surges in traffic or hackers? Where people want their images and video to really matter, they need to leave it to the companies with the resources invested in growing traffic to a live site.

How naive of me, defending the for-profit behemoths of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. The same giants that have proven all too willing to censor themselves at the request of authoritarian regimes. There seems to be no diplomatic answer to this.