One good thing about the floods here in the UK
There’s quite a lot of people across the United Kingdom sitting, depressed — and with good cause — as they stare around at three feet of water as far as the eye can see.
Some folk are without drinking water. Some houses ruined. Roads flooded. Traffic and travel chaos.
One good thing — apart from the obvious fact that, to my knowledge, there’s been no loss of life so far — is the spread and influence of eye witness mobile media.
With hundreds of thousands of people in the country sporting Nokia N95 style 5 megapixel camera handsets — and almost every new handset on the market coming with a 2 megapixel or larger lens, it’s rare to flick up a news website without seeing user contributed imagery and videos.
And it’s brilliant.
I love it. I do really enjoy viewing pictures and video taken by real people on the ground. Like the video I saw on the BBC site earlier this week featuring a guy ‘swimming’ in a flooded road. So inventive was the footage and so illustrating of the magnitude of the flooding in this particular area, the clip even made the BBC main news broadcast.
It’s much better seeing than hearing about ‘3 feet of water’. Years ago one or two photographers might have made it to a disaster area within 5-10 hours or within a day. Then a few camera teams would limp around and maybe charter a helicopter. Nowadays I’m loving the fact that the folk on the ground are able to capture high quality records of their experiences — and then transmit them swiftly for dissemination to us all.
Almost everyone’s a snapper nowadays too.
There are, for example, six Nokia E and N Series handsets in my train carriage at the moment (I counted) excluding the two in my laptop bag. There are only nine people dotted about the carriage this evening — it’s quite empty — but I’m pretty confident that if Brad Pitt boarded the train then vomitted over the train guard, all of the unassuming digital natives around me would have the incident captured and broadcast to the world in moments.
The more that news stories are peppered with user generated content obtained principally from mobile handses, the more people are going to be educated about the network and device capabilities — which is only good for the industry.
One lead news story on the BBC supplemented with compelling mobile video footage is worth a billion ‘please use your mobile’ adverts from a mobile operator.
Cases in point?
– SMS Text News reader Paul caught this BBC gallery featuring a photo of the flooded Vodafone office taken by an employee (I think).
– The second link on Sky News right now reads ‘Your Latest Flood Pics’.
