"Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine (we all live in each other's shadows)." -Irish proverb
This past weekend, a loathsome maniac who did horrific damage to New York was cut down to size in a place he expected to be safe. And after Donald Trump went to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Osama bin Laden was killed.
If you're like me, you probably didn't learn that for the first time when President Obama made the announcement; rather, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with the news about an hour early, while Obama was still preparing and news desks were asking when it was okay to even speculate. That's right; after bringing down Hosni Mubarak, the Damn Kids with their social media Tweeters decided to scoop the news media and the leader of the free world. I couldn't look away from my Facebook feed the night of the announcement, just because it was all so damn cool. "Wow," I thought Aspiely, "I'm witnessing history being documented as it occurs. Cool." (I'm not much more articulate mentally than I am in person.) On some level, I wanted to take a screenshot of the entire thing and preserve it somewhere. "Where were you when you heard?" "Online, making tasteless jokes about it."
But the role of social media in the story of bin Laden's death didn't end there. Some of you may have heard about the Pakistani computer programmer who accidentally documented the entire raid via Twitter; I couldn't help but be reminded of another case of "where were you when you heard" that was accidentally documented, that is, the Zapruder film. As I thought about that and I looked at my feed, at an ever-expanding picture of the zeitgeist, I couldn't help but think that everything had changed, for the world in general and for journalism in particular. Every one of us is becoming our own news archive, and at the risk of sounding like an after-school special, we have, I think, a responsibility to be the face of our time that we want to show the future. Can you imagine how you'd feel if you found your grandfather's Facebook status from the forties about how much he hated the Japanese?
I realize this post is starting to get kind of meandering and Aspielicious (kill me if I ever say that out loud), but given the nature of the point I'm trying to make, I think that's forgivable. Rene Belloq was wrong; we're no longer just passing through history. And now, I'm gonna close with this disheartening image.
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