Mark H Jones
Mark Jones is Global Community Editor for Reuters and has run AlertNet for nearly five years. He's interested in what makes media reporting of humanitarian crises so inconsistent and whether bloggers can fill the gap.
Virginia Tech, social media and emergencies
Much has been made of how students used social media -- Instant Messaging, LiveJournal, blogs etc -- to update one another during the mass campus shootings at Virginia Tech last month. But despite all this networking, and the ubiquity of mobile phones, social media did as badly as official communication channels in issuing warnings in the two-hour gap between the first two shootings and the later rampage. I was surprised by this. I thought I had spotted a trend for phones, especially mobiles, playing a growing role in emergencies. I had this neat thesis that growing access to communications technology would make it increasingly possible to issue alerts and so limit the impact of humanitarian emergencies. ...
Can avatars save Darfur?
Last month, Unicef Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow spoke about Darfur. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think. Nothing apart from the fact that both she and her audience were discussing this most serious of issues while portrayed as animated cartoon avatars in the online game of Second Life In an event hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mia Farrow highlighted the existence of a virtual refugee camp within Second Life Camp Darfur which was set up this time last year. ...
Can bloggers save Darfur?
A couple of bloggers in the past few days have been considering what the blogosphere can do for Darfur. Our friends at Global Voices tipped me off to the We Blog for Darfur initiative. And Google Blogoscoped asks the question: "Is there anything that we can do - with our knowledge of means and methods of communication - to get world leaders to act, finally, to prevent the death and suffering of millions of people?" ...
The limits to diplomacy via blogging
UN envoy to Sudan Jan Pronk runs a blog detailing the realities of peace negotiations in Darfur. He's admirably open and last week reported that Khartoum-backed forces had been beaten in two major battles. ...
Journalists to get Nobel Peace Prize?
The Nobel peace prize will be awarded on October 13th and the Guardian reports that the Nobel committee believes journalists should be eligible. Professor Geir Lundestad, secretary of the committee, says Nobel has commissioned a study on the links between journalism and peace and mentions a list of possible contenders including CNN, the New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais but rules out the BBC. ...
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