Race and Beyond: Will The Troubles in Ferguson Point Toward a New Way Forward?

[applegrove]

Race and Beyond: Will The Troubles in Ferguson Point Toward a New Way Forward?

By Sam Fulwood III at American Progressive

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2014/08/21/95925/will-the-troubles-in-ferguson-point-toward-a-new-way-forward/

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There’s a second trend in the use of social media as an organizing tool among the protesters. Almost from the beginning, as I noted in last week’s column, the rage of Ferguson’s black community was documented in 140-character tweets and videos posted on Instagram.

But in communities suspicious of establishment institutions, including the police and traditional media, the person-to-person interactions of on-the-ground commentary and opinion carried elevated authority. With a hashtag and a camera phone, the protesters themselves were simultaneously the news event and reporters of it.

“Because of social media, the police don’t have control of this story,” David Karpf, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told USA Today. “It’s opened everything up, changed how the media decides what’s worthy of coverage—and who to trust.”

I think it goes deeper than that. Social media competes with authoritarian communication forms, allowing for alternative narratives to shape public awareness. In the past, highly edited news forms—whether newspapers, where I spent nearly three decades, or nightly television network broadcasts—created the “rough draft of history” model for how Americans made sense of current events. No longer. Social media has the ability to democratize our streams of communication, while atomizing our national cohesion.


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