Citizen Journalism

The actions of the last few weeks have led me to question the very nature of citizenship, activism, and journalism. I used to see journalism as a noble profession, willfully divorced from moralizing and dedicated to seeking the truth. With the ubiquity of technology turning many of us into citizen journalists, the importance of this nobility becomes less and less clear. Much has been written about the trust we place in the "truth" of the image, and its ability to manipulate. This idea of acting as a witness and a documenter, and intention behind that action, is an important piece of the technology and activism puzzle. While I initially set out to explore only the use of technology by activists, citizen journalists who witness and record political action are activists in their own right, and I will have to consider them as such in this paper.