Text messaging delivers the news

Tanzanian blogger Ndesanjo Macha was speaking on: ‘From rock painting to mental acrobatics' during the Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI) conference held alongside Highway Africa at Rhodes University in Grahamstown this week.

According to Macha, who also doubles as the editor of Global Voices, the future is mobile (phones), which he added, is in citizens hands.

“Everyone is becoming a ‘journalist' today. With a mobile phone in your hand, you can record news events and text the same to your friends and newsrooms; or even better, download the same to a blog,” said Ndesanjo.

“In June this year, a member of parliament in Tanzania passed away, at night there was a lot of mobile reporting, we were all reporters and by the time media houses picked up the story, it was no news at all.”

He said bloggers are fully in charge of social media and in the process share stories with citizens.

“The activity is a form of social and citizen media, bloggers find it difficult to keep to themselves information (because) they are storytellers and share stories as wide as possible,” said Ndesanjo.

He stressed that blogs have become ‘community' spaces where people in the Diaspora can communicate with those at home while blogging is a quirky activity that has been heralded for revolutionizing journalism.

But will the blogs kill old media? Bloggers have taught mainstream reporters a lesson or two. Blogging played a pivotal role, for example, in the downfall of Trent Lott as United States majority leader in 2002. The mainstream media might have missed Lott's remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, but outrage in the ever-growing ‘blogosphere' fanned the flames until newspapers and cable news took up the story.

Today the popular online service, Blogger, which allows you to create a modest Weblog for free, has reportedly over a million users.

Bloggers have been compared to 19th-century pamphleteers and to the 17th-century British diarist Samuel Pepys. Though criticized by mainstream news columnists like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam. They have gotten their revenge by picking their critics apart online. The Godfather of present day blogging , it's generally agreed is the Internet gossip Matt Drudge, whose role in the Clinton-Lewinsky saga resembles the role of today's bloggers in Lott's demise.

Source: HANA www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za