The building belongs to CCTV - China Central Television, No. 1 in China. Its voice represents the government.
A high-rank official decided to celebrate Lantern Festival with fireworks. Those fireworks were so powerful that they had to be approved by the government.
As it began to burn, thousands of onlookers (well, a burning flame over 170 yards) used cellphones to take pictures / video to send to friends. In half an hour the news spreaded over the Internet.
As the building was burning, CCTV calmly reported the wild fire in Australia, with little word mentioned this striking 70 million lose (building along. with Olympic Games reporting equipments, the number can raise to 100 million).
Enraged grassroots live broadcasted the fire. It was said that the police had tried to stop the illegal firework use but was in vain. A fact was that in the past 3 years CCTV broke the law without any punishment.
In sum, the most influential network CCTV did little while grassroots live broadcasted with cell phone and the Internet (SMS, text, audio/video clips.) Professional pretends not knowing anything, amateurs did the job.
When doing the reporting, many discussion threads were deleted. Virtually grassroots fought with net moderators until they got the instruction from above allowing such discussions to continue. Even so, many posts were still cleaned up in the following day.
As the fire started, it was about 9 am in US and I was viewing a photography site and follow a thread with high quality photos live report. In the evening when I came home, this thread was no longer exist.
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This is a great example of how the cult of the expert does NOT work. Whether it be the governments of the world (including China's) or enormous corporations (more often than not in collusion with the above governments), the experts often have inside reasons for obsucating or obstructing the true picture of things. Often, they are hedging bets, determining policy, trying to figure out WHAT to do. Meanwhile, the honest amateurs are interested in getting the story out.
ReplyDeleteThe "internet web thingy" is extremely dangerous to both tyrannical corporations (like possibly the TV station) or tyrannical governments (like the Chinese government and more and more the US government). The fall of gatekeepers is extremely disconcerting to tyrants and "experts". They see their kingdoms crumbling into dust. The insecurities wrought by inventions/affordances that lead to new paradigms are very disconcerting to rulers and the true effects can last for centuries. We've yet to see what the new paradigm will be but I suggest it will be hard to guess.
I will also mention other threats to big government/big corporations as mentioned by Bill Clintone's paranoia concerning OK: Talk radio (note the attempts to put the "fairness [censorship]" act back into play with the left-wing democrats in congress, families in control of education, the internet [yes, clintone said that], etc.
The Cult of the Experts is about over YiYang and high time, IMNSHO.