Mumbai: People witnessed. They Twittered. They Flickr'd. Observers of the violence and chaos in Mumbai were Twittering so much that there was a Mumbai tweet about once per second.
The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.
At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years.
Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world — whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.
“When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel,” said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. “On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.”Citizen journalists avoided some of the bureaucratic headaches faced by media organizations. At the end of the day on Friday, CNN’s license to transmit live video in India expired, forcing the network’s correspondents to report via telephone. CNN and other channels in the United States relied on live coverage and taped reports from Indian networks.
The cameras and phones carried by people swept up in the attacks were not subject to any such rules. Mr. Shanbhag photographed one of the fires at the Taj hotel and the wreckage outside a popular cafe that was attacked on Wednesday and posted them on his Flickr stream. Some people transmitted video from inside the Taj hotel to news networks via cellphones. And reporters used cellphones to send text messages to hotel guests who had set up barricades in their rooms.
Much of this activity flourished early in the crisis, while there was a vacuum of official information either from government sources or from mainstream media outlets still struggling to understand the extent of the attacks.
Sreenath Sreenivasan, the dean of student affairs and a professor at the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said, “A little bit of information is better than no information at all.”