Do You Have One?

Mobile phone is now on screen. Jessica E Vascellaro made a good point of it in Wall Street Journal last Wednesday.

It was the latest reminder that the device that tens of millions of people are now carrying around in their pockets is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful news-gathering tools on Earth. These phones are proliferating, increasing the chances that they will be on the scene when news is made.

And the following is Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, remarks on individual people taking jounalist's jobs, quoted by Vascellaro:

Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com, says handpicking user-submitted content helps the network tell a more complete story. "Even the best journalists are only able to cover a story from the outside looking in," he says. "Citizen participants see a story from the inside looking out."

However, I wonder why Vascellaro didn't mention even a bit of the potential mobile phone has in disseminating information, 3G technology, and of mobile phone as a mass media channel.

When TIME issued a special edition of “YOU” most of us aware that the time has come for us to find back our rights for personally defining our worlds. But it was only about the Internet. Thanks to the massive spreading of the three-minutes mobile phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution, also the phone video of a respected Indonesian MP last month, for they have moreover revealed how powerful mobile phone is. Similar to the Internet, this technology provides a common room for people to personally involve in the process of reconstructing the world verbally or simbolically. And just like the Internet it challenges communication theorists: tell me, is it true that there are two separate kinds of communication processes, mass and interpersonal?