Reality Upgrade

Tube Blasts: Commuters Dead” read the Evening Standard headline placards across London. I can see them at Flickr, which gives me something that the traditional news media never quite deliver: firsthand perspective. With the help of Flickr tags like “blasts,” “bombs,” and “London,” I can get an idea of what my fellow photobloggers on the street in London are seeing. They become, in effect, a worldwide network of amateur news photographers.

So far, at least one of them was on the Tube this morning, and his cameraphone pictures are now making their way up to the major media.

So this morning brings to our attention not only that the Western world is still a terrorist target (lest we get complacent in our relative lack of post-9/11 trauma), but also that we have avenues of information that we didn’t have in, say, 2001.