Can citizen journalism and/or cyber technology raise global awareness?

Citizen Journalism has raised, and will continue to raise global awareness. True citizen journalism, if it's defined as journalism that is amateur in nature, and done by someone directly impacted or in the vicinity of a major event, is perhaps the purest form of journalism there is and the paramount of "primary sources". As seen in events such as the Iranian election, where some of the largest sources of information regarding what was happening were tweets or youtube videos uploaded by everyday people, citizen journalism can have a very large impact.

With that in mind, there are two problems with citizen journalism. The first is the ability for it to be transported or mass-communicated. Anyone with a computer with an internet connection and webcam or camera phone is capable of publishing a video on youtube. Unfortunately, the movement of that video (or information) is largely dependent on the people who initially receive it (if anyone receives it at all). Citizen journalism relies on individual citizens to continue to pass the story along, because a video can become an internet sensation and be passed in email chains and facebook posts, OR it can sit on youtube with only 5 views forever.

The second problem is that the amateur content has very little safeguards against bias or falsehood. One must keep in mind, first, that citizen journalism is very often one person's perspective on an event (what would happen, for example, if the filmers of the Neda video instead chose to focus on something else? or completely ignore the woman?). Additionally, because amateur content requires very little effort, is usually not planned well, and does not need to be (and is very often not) professional, it is easy to replicate content and claim it as "citizen journalism." I did not understand this second point until Prof. Fischer asked us in class how we "know" that the Neda video is authentic and not-staged. As a first time-viewer, who knows nothing about the narrative, the video may as well have been staged-- it lacks the credibility to say otherwise.