Social media confronts xenophobia

In the last couple of days, xenophobia reared its very ugly head in South Africa. Senseless violence and atrocities are being committed against other human beings. There was an outrage in the media, and blogging individuals made their opinions heard. It was especially multimedia by The Times and the Mail & Guardian that had the biggest effect.

In an article by Simone Puterman from Bizcommunity, Gregor Rohrig, new media specialist for Avusa iLabs, said:

“The views and reactions to the photo story ‘Flames of Hate‘ exceeded any previous multimedia story we’ve published and is a record-breaker for The Times multimedia product… While extremely tragic, this photo story was a powerful narrative to present on the day of the official multimedia portal launch.”

In the same article Matthew Buckland, GM of the M&G Online, said:

The M&G News in Photo site “has received more than 170 000 pages views, 271 comments and their servers have gone down at least three times so far. The swarm, which shows concurrent users at any one time, has been busy for over 24 hours.”

“The horrifying photos of the xenophobia violence attracted record readership and comments from our users. They also served as a spontaneous, and perhaps cathartic, rallying point for debate and discussion about the events”

On the Afrigator xenophobia page, there has been 237 blog posts and 37 news articles thus far speaking out against xenophobia and opinions relating the issue.

For the last week or more, xenophobia related topics have dominated the Muti hot page, which is quite unusual if you consider that most of the time it is predominantly tech related items.

Even the BBC wrote an article entitled: “SA Bloggers want end to violence”

Nic Haralambous, editor of the SA Rocks! blog wrote an excellent post with some very, very good advice: “What can you do right now to help foreigners?”

A lot of other well known bloggers like Mike Stopforth and Rafiq Phillips are talking about action and actually doing something about the situation!

Personally, I’m pretty amazed on how social media impacted on this issue. It would be interesting to see how far this reach will continue to go. In the back of my head, one cannot help but to wonder what impact this would have had on our tainted history? If we had things like News in Photo, Multimedia at The Times, Youtube, Flickr, blogs, etc… what an impact would it have had on early apartheid days? Could it have changed the course of history? Always sad when looking back at what could have been if only we had these tools back then…