By now you've all seen the photo, above, highlighting the difference between the papal announcement in '05 versus the one from this year. At one point some design team figured out they could wedge a tiny camera into a cell phone, and it changed everything; anytime anything of note happens, the first thing people do is whip out their phones to record it.
As we mentioned in an earlier post, that means we internet denizens now get to see footage of things we couldn't have twenty years ago, like the disaster in Japan. In a country with cell phone penetration that high, hundreds of citizen journalists were snapping pics and video, which helped drive home to the rest of the world how terrible that tragedy was.
Monday's bombing in Boston reveals a new facet to this phenomena. In an effort to identify the bomber, police began actively courting anyone who had taken footage prior to the blast, as there were certainly more people holding up cell phone cameras or now-ubiquitous DSLRs than there were surveillance cameras in the area.
Bostonite Ben Levine works at a marketing and communications firm just steps away from one of the blast sites. Prior to the explosion, Ben was snapping pics of the marathon from the window circled in red below:
This is one of the photos he snapped a few hours before the blast:
Here's the same photo after hundreds or thousands of eyeballs had pored over it:
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