Re:Here comes the first TikTok war
by zozbot234 on Thursday February 24, 2022 @05:37PM
(#30461299)
Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most popular right now.
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The difference is photo and video.
Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled.
It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck.
And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.