Internet: Powerful Stuff
But that's not the point of this post. The point, rather, is that the cost barrier for entry into the multimedia-reporting-enabled populace has been demolished. Even my 14 year old niece carries a mobile phone that records video to SD cards, and that was a two year old hand-me-down. You can pick up a phone that can record video now for a whopping *negative* twenty five bucks (usual caveats about agreeing to contracts apply). If 80% of the world's population and 71% of America's owns a mobile phone, and if service providers are more or less paying you to take the phones in exchange for service agreements, then it would seem possible to ensure that no event in society would ever go unnoticed, forgotten, or suppressed.
This of course, can be good, bad or very, very, very bad. But let's focus on the good for now. Cameraphones and indeed, ubiquitous media, have been responsible for the apprehension of a number of criminals and the resolution of many cases which otherwise would have suffered from a lack of evidence.
Where television brought the Tiananmen Square Massacre into the world's collective field-of-vision, the internet brings us foreign programming that defies any form of suppression:
Of course, empowerment of the public is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, instantaneous dispersal of information can be a downright awful thing as Koreans are now demonstrating to us what a technology-obsessed population benefiting from the world's highest broadband penetration rates is capable of accomplishing, in the most unpleasant of ways. It cuts both ways. You're giving a mouth and a pair of eyes, connected to your own, to everyone in the world, regardless of whether or not you want to hear what they have to say or see what they see.
