Posts Tagged ‘Arun Shanbag’

Social Media & Citizen Journalism in the 11/26 Mumbai Terror Attacks: A Case Study

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Introduction

Late on November 26, 2008, India was shaken by a series of terrorist attacks across ten prominent locations in Mumbai, India’s cultural and financial capital (Wikipedia).

The ten terrorists, linked to Islamic terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, managed to hold Mumbai hostage for more than 60 hours and killed 171 people, including several foreign nationals.

Citizen journalism played an important role in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and several observers, both in the mainstream media and the tech blogosphere, have written about it from many perspectives.

The story has been framed in several ways — “participatory media vs. legacy media”, “Twitter vs. blogs”, and even “Indian internet users vs. American internet users”. As someone who tracks social media and citizen journalism in India very closely, I thought that it may be worthwhile to write a long article length post and separate the myths from the reality.

I’ll divide the case study into four sections —

- Section 1: What was the role of citizen journalism in covering the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack?