You won’t hear about it on Digg. It’s not on Newsvine. Good luck trying to find relevant links on del.icio.us. It’s nowhere to be found on popurls, or OriginalSignal. It’s not being talked about on the blogs Memeorandum, Megite or TailRank track. There isn’t a page on Wikipedia. And little reference on WikiNews. On Topix.com or Netscape.com, nary a peep.
Even the regional online community I help host, Philly Future has little posted.
Philadelphia’s larger community of aggregated local bloggers are talking, but maybe not with each other, and mostly to their own independent communities.
On Flickr there are over 70 photos, a few powerfully relevant. On YouTube much the same, and this offers hope.
What am I talking about? The rising tide of gun violence that is taking innocent lives by the day in Philadelphia.
You would think the obscene loss of life in our city would merit a few links, a few mentions, a few drops of interest.
But no. Not a whit. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t rank.
You could argue that there has been no ‘defining event’ to draw interest – like a mass murder.
Or that the national mainstream media (damn I hate that term) has largely ignored it as well.
But those excuses don’t detract from the fact that what’s happening here – and elsewhere in other urban centers across this nation – is news.
And that for some reason – our current social media environment – just looks the other way.
Mathew Ingram, when looking at Pew’s latest research on who is using participatory media, wonders if the Web is half full or half empty? Greg Searling at search engine land and Jordan McCollum answer, although not as bluntly as I.
We have a long way to go.
A long way to go for those who are weak and powerless to be given a voice here.
A long way to go for those who have no influence a representation here.
A long way to go for those who have no visibility a means to communicate their importance here.
A long way to go for the news that affects our *daily* lives, the kind that percolates slowly, needs context to be understood, and is about subject matter we may not care to know about, but should, to be produced and distributed here.
This may lead to a place that elites find so distasteful, so raw, so low brow, so mundane and reflective of *all* of human society, they go off to establish something shiny and new.
Maybe so.
But until then there is work to do.
Related: Anil Dash: “Those of you who are defending this status quo are defending a culture of failure”