For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity | The Register

No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

Shelley Powers had this to say:

Orlowskihas a good point: is a tragedy more ‘real’ just because it’s traversed routers? Do we need to see 500 instances of the same photo, scraped from TV, to validate our experiences? Do we need to have a thousand
pundits start bashing each other about causes, while the bodies are still being carried out? Must we link to each other with breathless exclamations of “so and so� has the latest “breaking� news on the story — followed by some outlandish rumor? (Do webloggers know how silly it is to write such things in their weblogs? Or are links worth the cost to their dignity?)

More importantly, why do we have to go through this validation ritual every time events happen?

I’m afraid that Orlowski is going to be disappointed in me, because I’m going to indulge in a bit of writing about an event, and it does fall within his 24 hour mark. No, I’m not going to write about the London bombs: I’m going to write about Hurricane Dennis. I know that some would consider doing so a Cable Cliche, whatever that means. But Missouri has a lot riding on this storm; not as much as some states, but a lot. And I’m not writing news, I’m telling a story.

Me? I think it’s much a do about nothing really. I said this earlier: “Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do.” The net changes nothing in this respect. It’s simply providing us new ways to do so. Ways that bypass filters that have existed for the last fifty years or so – and to a greater audience than before. It is not changing human nature – but providing us new avenues for expressing it.