iFOCOS President Andrew Nachison appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. He discussed the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shooting – and how the digital media witnesses and others used to tell the story reflects the rise of We Media.
“The story is unfolding all around us. Marshall McLuhan used the notion of media being accoustic and you really get a sense of that today, that everybody is a story teller. The information is coming at us from many different sources. And the Blacksburg shooting, for me at least, was a really poignant example of this.”
“Young people do this intuitively and naturally without thinking about it, without a sense of wonder when they send a text message or they send an email or they shoot a video or they post a message to their friends on MySpace. But it’s not just young people. That’s the exaggeration. Technology is allowing people to share information and to share feelings and to tell stories in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And the big story is not that we’ve got all this wonderful fabulous technology making life better, the big story is that story-telling is exploding by virtue of this technology.”
“What’s news and what’s journalism, those are professional definitions that help us define work we do as professionals, or not as professionals. But story-telling is much broader than that, and a lot of what we’re seeing is reflecting the emotional impact of this experience.”