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Friday, November 11, 2011

When Communication Kills

When Communication Kills

A friend whose brother-in-law was killed recently as a consequence of the cartel violence in Mexico said it best.  She explained the violence was finally brought to the fore, had become real. Before, the violence had seemed more of a concept, at a distance--until it struck close to home.

In a similar fashion, the struggle for power and domination by cartels in Mexico became real to me this week. The murder of a man this week in Nuevo Laredo, who thugs wrote in a hasty note was being punished because of his blogging activities was my own wake up call to fear.

Students in my Introduction to Mass Communication classes had just finished examining the way media impacts our society by studying the films "The Most Dangerous Man in America" and "All The President's Men. This week we explored the innovations that new media technologies like blogging and Twitter have brought to to the business and technology of mass media.

We had just viewed the inspiring and encouraging call for citizen journalism in the TED Talk from British journalist Paul Lewis

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_lewis_crowdsourcing_the_news.html

That's when we learned of another innovation. We read of the fourth person murdered in Nuevo Laredo due to their social media activities.
Here is an update from the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/mexican-man-apparently-killed-by-drug-cartel-for-anti-crime-web-comments/2011/11/09/gIQA24X66M_story.html?wprss=rss_world