“It’s all smart kitchens and talking bikes these days.”
The raid that killed Osama bin Laden yesterday has to have been one of the most secret operations in the world — and yet it was live-blogged by an inadvertent witness.
Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant trying to get away from it all in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad , was so irritated by the low-flying helicopters that he began tweeting about them as they were overhead, not realizing that they were American machines carrying out the operation that would end bin Laden’s life. After Obama’s announcement, Athar added, “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.” (He now has 65,000 followers on Twitter.)
Was he the only person on social media in Abbottabad? No, he explained, but others in the area tend to be on Facebook instead.
Pakistan is not even very wired, with 94% of the population not using the Internet. But even in that very poor country 38% of the population had mobile phones in 2010, and that number has surely risen.
This is another moment that tells us what a transparent world will be like: an ever-smaller percentage of newsworthy events will occur without witnesses able to record and broadcast what they see. This may already seem ubiquitous — from NATO plane spotting to Syrians reporting demonstrations — but it has only just begun.
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Image courtesy Sierragoddess (Flickr)
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