Periodismo ciudadano y Twitter. El caso del 30-S ecuatoriano

Abstract

Explaining how citizen journalism functions in the digital age presents us with a series of difficulties. The first has to do with identifying virtual spaces and the subjects that choose to exercise citizen journalism, as well as the specific mechanisms they use to produce information. A second difficulty implies differentiating between journalistic information and public opinion. And the third deals directly with Twitter’s agency as a socio-technical artifact. This first approximation to citizen journalism in Ecuador is centered around the first fortyeight hours of the police uprising on September30, 2010 during which the President was wounded in a police station and detained at the Police Hospital, news transmissions from the private media were suspended and the President was later freed by the armed forces after a shootout unprecedented in this country.