In addition to Flickr, YouTube and the traditional social networking site, new video and picture sharing platforms like Quik, Bambuser, TwitPic and Yfrog continue to be used more and more frequently to document protests around the world. Including in Italy.
by Federico Guerrini
A few days ago, user Marco Scibona immortalized a few moments of the anti-TAV protesters escape into the woods in Val di Susa. The video was taken with a smartphone camera and ended up online almost immediately thanks to Quik, a Skype-owned platform for realtime video sharing that is gaining more ground with digital activitsts.
Like its Swedish competitor, Bambuser, which is used in Egypt to document meetings in Tarhir Square, these services have mostly been designed for smartphones and, because of this, the images can be immediately distributed on the main 2.0 services.
A URL, a unique Web address, is assigned at the start of a recording, which can be shared over the most popular social networks like Facebook or Twitter to let whoever wishes follow the event in real time. Various image sharing levels can be set: they can be shared with just a close circle of firends or everyone online. The quality of mid to high end smartphone lenses is good enough that they don’t make us miss professional shots too much.
Activists have new weapons in their arsenal and this is also true for the photosharing platforms. Many third party app have been added to Flickr, which was originally designed to be used with Twitter.
For the moment (and things could change quickly), the chat network doesn’t allow multimedia contents to be added directly to wall updates. The only thing that you can do is insert a “short Url,” a shortened link that directs you to a sharing platform.
The most popular is TwitPic, which became famous a few years ago after a passanger posted a picture of the airplane that was forced to land on the Hudson. Now, protesters in Cairo use it to take pictures of the military as it attempts to disperse the crowds or other aspects of the protests.
Another popular platform is Yfong. Its app version for smartphone is very popular so it is an important source for news about what’s happened in the mountains of Piemonte or in Egypt. With a quick search, you can find “disturbing” images like the ones posted by Sednonsatiata who documented the police breaking up a No-Tav demonstration.
Naturally, all this wonderful new technology has its limits. You can’t rely on everything that is posted. During the conflict in Libya, for example, there were images of injured and dying people posted on Twitter using TwitPic or Yfrog but it was impossible to tell whether they were recent pictures or if they images from battles that were going on at that moment. Episodes like the alleged common graves on the beaches of Tripoli, which turned out to be fake, showed that modern wars are also fought with propaganda on social networks and separating fact from fiction in the moment is not always easy.
Related articles
- How AP is working with Bambuser to gather live video from citizen journalists, by @rmcathy (nextlevelofnews.com)
- Which is the best website for tweeting images? I’ve tried five (zdnet.com)
