MobileActive.org

Writing for a new media review is like writing history as events unfold. In a short time, this article will be out of date and perhaps no more than a few personal 2.0 snapshots taken of a slice of our lives circa 2009. Nevertheless, it is useful to draw a clear picture of how this medium is being used today, to define some of its emerging social properties, and to document and pay closer attention to its influence on our daily experiences and self-mediations. By self-mediations I refer to how each one of us decides his or her digital imprint: what we post online, whether they are videos, photographs, CVs, and the like. Due to the enormous quantity of content produced by users – now usually called prosumers – we should pay close attention to these
doings.

My focus will be on how camera phones affect how news is created and shared, reminding us of how closely the concept of ‘newsworthiness’ is linked to immediacy. Then I will briefly compare the camera phone video experience to the cinematic experience and discuss how film narrative and conventions have affected camera use for better or for worse. Finally, I will pose some open questions that touch on the academic and social value of the camera phone images, and on how contextualising them remains a crucial ingredient in all analysis. I will conclude by considering the visual impact that this handheld object is having on our lives and relationships.

Serious crises and disasters have micro and macro social arrangements that differ
from routine situations, as the field of disaster studies has described over its 100-year history.
With increasingly pervasive information and communications technology (ICT) and a
changing political arena where terrorism is perceived as a major threat, the attention to crisis
is high. Some of these new features of social life have created real change in the sociology of
disaster that we are only beginning to understand. However, much of what might seem to be
new is not; rather ICT makes some behaviors more visible, in particular first response and
altruistic activities. Even so, with each new crisis event, the calls for technological solutions
and policy change come fast and furious, often in absence of empirical research. Our lab is
establishing an area of sociologically informed research and ICT development in the area of
crisis informatics. Here, we report on some of the challenges and findings when conducting
empirical study where the subject of attention is disperse, emergent and increasingly
expanding through on-line arenas. We specifically consider the challenge of studying citizen-
side information generation and dissemination activities during the April 16, 2007 crisis at
Virginia Tech, which we have investigated both on-site and on-lin