In focus: the power of social media

You will probably have become aware of the recent incident on the Tube at Holborn station, where a London Underground worker wholly overreacted to a customer’s complaint at having gotten his arm trapped in a closing train door. The entrepreneur and blogger Jonathan Macdonald, who managed to catch the latter part of the exchange on his cameraphone, was instantly catapulted to social media fame in the wake of the MSM’s latching onto his story, and has posted a very thoughtful follow-up piece about whether social media is altering the balance (arguably a democratic deficit) between journalists and ordinary people in terms of making, reporting and interpreting the news.

Leaving aside the rampaging elephant in the room – namely the fact that TfL find it logically consistent and somehow justified to ratchet up fare prices at the same time as tolerating behaviour as foul as that of this employee – the speed with which the story went from anecdotal afternoon incident to all over the evening news shows just how ferociously fast information travels nowadays. As Mr Macdonald points out, the multiple prongs of Facebook, Twitter and direct contact with the MSM meant that researchers were scouring Google and the blogosphere within less than an hour of the blogpost going up – perhaps most pleasingly, this means that the MSM themselves have realised that it is not Reuters or Bloomberg who produce news, nor even the pretty pictures to go with it, but usually ordinary people operating entirely on their own.

So in celebration of the growing democratisation and, I suppose, privatisation (as opposed to corporatisation) of current affairs, here’s the YouTube video of the incident for you to savour:

~ by Marius Ostrowski on October 20, 2009.