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Abstract

While climate change is projected to increase displacement of people, knowledge on this issue remains limited and fragmented. In his paper we focus on the micro-level and study the effects of individual perceptions of different types of environmental events (i.e., sudden/short-term vs. slow-onset/long-term) on migration decisions. Our results based on newly collected micro-level survey data from Vietnam shows that while slow-onset environmental events, such as droughs, significantly decrease the likelihood of migration, short-term events, such as floods, are positively related to migration, although not in a statistically significant way. When contrasting individual level perceptions with actual climatic events we observe that migrants and non-migrants perceive both long-term as well as sudden-onset environmental events in different ways. While non-migrants are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness of events such as floods and hurricanes, it is the migrants who are slightly better in judging the actual extremeness in the case of droughts.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s10584-016-1767-1 ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Supplementary material

References

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4. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) (2015) Global Estimates 2015. People displaced by disasters. IDMC, Geneva. www.internal-displacement.org/publications/2015/global-estimates-2015-people-displaced-by-disasters/ .

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6. IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) (2014b) Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, And Vulnerability. Part B: Regional Aspects. Chapter 24: Asia, p.1355 https://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap24_FINAL.pdf

7. Nawrotzki RJ, Bakhtsiyarava M (2016) International climate migration: Evidence for the climate inhibitor mechanism and the agricultural pathway. Population, Space & Place, Online, pp. 1-16. doi:

8. Nawrotzki RJ, Riosmena F, Hunter LM (2013) Do rainfall deficits predict U.S.-bound migration from rural Mexico? Evidence from the Mexican census. Popul Res Policy Rev 32(1):129-158

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

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Perceptions of environmental change and migration decisions

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While climate change is projected to increase displacement of people, knowledge on this issue remains limited and fragmented. In his paper we focus on the micro-level and study the effects of individual perceptions of different types of environmental events (i.e., sudden/short-term vs. slow-onset/long-term) on migration decisions.

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Sanjiangyuan is in the area of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai province, which contains the headwaters of the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Mekong River. Covering the southern and eastern parts of Qinghai, it has various landforms, high altitude grassland, mountains, wetlands and forest system.

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We support the Prime Minister and ensure the effective running of government. We are also the corporate headquarters for government, in partnership with HM Treasury, and we take the lead in certain critical policy areas.

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More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems.

Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity. Such people are likely to migrate in regions across Asia, and governments must start to prepare for the problems this will create, the Asian Development Bank warned.

The costs will be high - about $40bn is the likely price for adapting and putting in place protective measures, from sea walls to re-growing mangrove swamps that have been cut down, and that can help to protect against the impacts of storm surges.

But the problem is already taking effect, though at a much lower scale than is likely in the future. "While large-scale climate-induced migration is a gradual phenomenon, communities in Asia and the Pacific are already experiencing the consequences of changing environmental conditions including eroding shorelines, desertification and more frequent severe storms and flooding," the bank said at a workshop last week. This could lead to a widespread crisis across the region in coming years, if preparations are not made to deal with the current and probable future consequences.

Robert Dobias, climate change project chief at the Asian Development Bank, said that at present climate change is still a relatively small cause of migration, as economic causes loom largest and as environmental disasters happen independently of global warming. However, the problem is likely to increase in future years, with potentially severe consequences, including conflict as people are forced to move long distances.

Areas most at risk are low-lying islands such as the Maldives, whose environment minister, Mohamed Aslam, said the populations of entire islands in the archipelago had been forced to move. But coastal cities in developed regions could also face the threat of higher seas and storm surges, while regions that already suffer severe floods such as Bangladesh will have their risks intensified.

The Asian Development Bank warned that governments must start to make preparations now, to be ready for the multiplying threats, and because more extreme weather has already started to take effect, though changes so far have not been dramatic in their impact. "The number of extreme weather events is increasing and Asia and the Pacific is the region at the epicentre of weather disasters," the group said.

The bank is working on a report that will set out in detail the likely problems and propose a range of potential policy changes to help to deal with them. The report will be published next spring, though preliminary research is being disclosed at a series of regional conferences in the intervening months.

The probable solutions are likely to include measures to improve vital infrastructure, such as energy provision, transport systems and communication networks, in order to make such infrastructure more resilient to the effects of climate change.

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More than 30 million climate migrants in Asia in 2010, report finds

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More than 30 million people were displaced last year by environmental and weather-related disasters across Asia, experts have warned, and the problem is only likely to grow worse as climate change exacerbates such problems. Tens of millions more people are likely to be similarly displaced in the future by the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts and reduced agricultural productivity.

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climate change creating millions of "eco refugees

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Climate Change Creating Millions of "Eco Refugees," UN Warns

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Environmental degradation around the world is creating a new category of people known as "environmental refugees," a UN group says, and their ranks are steadily growing.

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三江源生态保护和建设十年成绩斐然

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三江源生态保护和建设十年成绩斐然

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三江源生态保护和建设十年成绩斐然,中国林业网,中国林业网

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This multimedia report features a 20-minute video documentary and long-form text. If you are short on time you might choose to either watch or read. Alternatively, sit back for an in-depth insight into the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forcibly relocated for the world's biggest water transfer. This project was produced in collaboration with ChinaFile, a project of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Like so many of Mao's pronouncements, it sounded simple. "The South has a lot of water; the North lacks water. So if it can be done, borrowing a little water and bringing it up might do the trick." Four decades later Mao's vision has been brought into focus as China's most ambitious engineering project - a scheme to bring some 45 billion cubic meters of water, mostly from the Yangtze and its tributaries, up to the north China plain to Beijing and surrounding parched farmland and factory towns. The central route of the project began carrying water from Hubei to Beijing in late 2014, and, like so many of Mao's plans, it has left a swath of human devastation in its wake.

Most environmentalists see the South-to-North Water Transfer Project as a necessary, though not sufficient solution to the severe water shortages suffered in China's capital and surrounding areas - a situation that owes much to weather and climate - but which has been compounded by the over-damming of the region's rivers and the severe pollution of its already small supply. Without comparably ambitious plans for regulation and conservation, experts like Ma Jun have been saying for more than a decade, those 45 billion cubic meters are just a drop in the bucket.

What are the direct human costs of the transfer? Who has won, and who has lost? On the short end of the stick are the people who live in the areas giving up their water, who, have had to leave their homes, find new work, leave behind community and family, and fathom how their lives fit into the grand and ambitious plans their leaders have devised to solve a nation's problems. - Introduction by Susan Jakes

On a rainy evening in September, the fisherman Cao Suizhou, his hand on the diesel engine, steers his small motorboat by sightline of the shore. There are no stars visible above, nor lights from homes along the boundary of the water.

This is not a natural lake, but a vast manmade reservoir-and the site of ongoing controversy and clashing ambitions in central China. The Danjiangkou reservoir-created by the damming of a major Yangtze River tributary in the late 1950s-was expanded in 2011 so that it now holds 30 billion cubic meters of water, which now runs from the artificial lake to Beijing through an open concrete canal 790 miles long, comparable to the full length of the state of Texas.

The channel, known as the central leg of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, was built as a lifeline to supply water to China's dry and populous northeast. Four-fifths of the country's water naturally flows through the south, yet the burgeoning capital, two-thirds of China's agricultural land, and much of the country's heavy industry are in the parched north. In the northern plains, over-pumped and dwindling aquifers already endanger the nation's breadbasket. The channel brought some relief when its water began flowing through Beijing's faucets about a year ago.

But the ambitious project, first conceived in the 1950s by Mao Zedong, has also transformed the lives of those in the region from which water was taken-a disruption of a far greater extent than planners anticipated, or admit today.

According to figures published in state media, around 340,000 people were relocated before the rising waters of the reservoir flooded their homes. However, interviews last fall with residents and a mayor in the region upstream of the dam reveal that many more were forced to move-perhaps more than half a million, according to the mayor of Xichuan, a county seat upstream of the dam in Henan province. Moreover, since 2003 when the central leg of the water-diversion project was green-lit, crucial streams of investment in infrastructure and business have all but drained from the upstream region-a swath of Henan, Hubei, and Shaanxi provinces that is home to about 17 million people -leaving behind a landscape of potholed roads, unmaintained schools, and closed factories and mines. "There is no long-term plan for economic development there because they always knew the water-transfer project was coming," says Zhang Kelou, an accountant in Henan's provincial capital; his clients have included Zhengzhou-based owners of shuttered mines and industries operating in the upstream area.

When Cao's little craft docks on the muddy shore of the reservoir, two friends help him unload a half dozen Styrofoam crates of tiny silver fish, the evening's catch. As a light rain grows stronger, Cao straps a flashlight to his straw hat and the small team works quickly in the dark to haul and pack the crates into a waiting truck.

For most of his life, Cao, now in his mid-50s, lived in a small village near the shoreline. Before the water level surged, most of his neighbors boarded chartered buses bound for Xin Caowan (or New Caowan), a "relocation village" of government-built housing a hundred miles away; now all that remains of their former home is a crumbling stone water tower and a nearby field of unmarked graves. Cao's wife, Jia Gailan, moved to New Caowan in 2009 and now looks after their two young granddaughters there, but she says that most migrants have struggled to find new work and many complain of poor quality soil and land.

Meanwhile, Cao was determined to continue fishing. "It's the only life I've ever known, the only thing I know how to do," he says, adding that he is too old now to be hired for factory work. With no fixed home, he sometimes sleeps in his boat, sometimes stays in a nearby village with friends there who are among the last to remain in their homes. It is a precarious existence: New government regulations expected to be enforced within the next year will prohibit the kind of fish-farming in wooden cages on the reservoir that brings in most of his income.

Past midnight, the fish truck bumps along a rough road of gravel and mud; there are no streetlights here. Cao, typically at work before dawn, has been fairly lucky, compared to many. He found a way to continue fishing and has made enough money to support his family, including his granddaughter's treatment for lymphoma. But if fishing on the reservoir is soon banned, can he reinvent himself again? Cao isn't sentimental, but he doesn't have a plan for the future, either. "When I get old, what can I do if I get a disease and have no money? I can only wait to die."

In a country of 1.4 billion souls, sweeping national policy decisions invariably disrupt lives, lifting some industries at the expense of others, privileging some regions over others, and forcing millions of people to adapt. In the case of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, it's too soon to assess the final legacy-and whether the painful trade-offs will be worth it. But one thing is already clear: even the diverted water will only quench Beijing's thirst for so long.

Danjiangkou dam, the concrete edifice raised to create the water diversion, is now an unlikely tourist attraction, with a forlorn holiday hotel situated opposite the compound's front gate. For a modest entrance fare, visitors can ride an open cart across the top of the dam, stopping for "scenic" photos.

Looking north toward the reservoir, the view is almost pastoral: a muted canvas of green and brown. Nothing has been built here for more than a decade, and much of what had previously been built, like Cao's village, has since been torn down. Turning in the opposite direction, the contrast is stark. Downstream unspools the usual cacophony of Chinese development: apartment buildings, shopping malls, construction cranes, and even a Ferris wheel, all signs of haphazard economic life.

Tour guides in hard hats present the dam as an engineering marvel-a testament to Chinese modernization and the state's ability to tame the natural landscape. Yet, a different story of the dam's history and long-term impacts comes from Pei Jianjun, mayor of Xichuan, the county in the western Henan province in which the reservoir and the canal head are located.

Once, Xichuan was the seat of a powerful regional kingdom, the Chu, as bronze relics on display at a municipal history museum attest. But today, it is an economically depressed area, and there's nothing grand about the dilapidated downtown: City Hall is flanked by small fenced yard used as a chicken coop.

Pei says his family has lived in the region for 700 years. During different stages of the dam's construction and subsequent raising (spanning more than 50 years, from the 1950s until 2011), different sets of his relatives were evicted on six separate occasions. "The first time that I remember was when I was seven years old," he recalls, waving a cigarette after lunch.

He has collected first-hand accounts of several families in his book, Century Migrants, an investigative history of the long-term social impacts of the Danjiangkou dam construction.

Most recently, beginning in 2003, local officials fanned out to inform the latest round of families, Cao's included, that they would have to move for another dam raising. Unlike in the past, the aim was not blunt eviction, but rather to cajole residents into consenting to the inevitable. By the standards of the past, the most recent expulsion was the most humane: With money from the central government, local authorities at least attempted to compensate migrants for lost land and property.

But whether reimbursement schemes were enacted fairly or disastrously varied greatly across the region. After examining the petitions of 248 migrant families in Xichuan in 2012, Feng Hu, a local prosecutor, compiled the most common grievances: shoddy home-building quality, smaller or less productive plots of farmland, fake residence permits, difficulty finding new employment, and compensation payments swallowed by local corruption. Cao's wife, Jia, adds another complaint: more severe pollution near her new home. "I can't sleep well in the new village; the air quality is not good," she says. "I don't like to use the local water for tea, because there's a lot of contamination." In other relocation villages, as Kathleen McLaughlin has reported in the Global Post, the farmers' mandatory contributions to their new homes have left them deeply in debt.

Ironically, stringent measures were enacted near the reservoir itself to protect its water quality. Mayor Pei says that 238 factories in and near Xichuan were shut down. Following directives from the central government, hundreds of local mines were also closed to prevent pollution from leeching into water bound for Beijing. Meanwhile, to prevent agricultural runoff, farmers in the catchment area are banned from spraying chemical fertilizers or pesticides (though the level of enforcement remains unclear). While the natural environment has noticeably improved, says Pei, new job opportunities have not replaced those lost from the shuttered brick factories and paper mills. He estimates the direct economic cost to Xichuan to be 800 million RMB annually, a hefty price for a small county.

Pei stresses the extent of the region's sacrifice for the sake of a national project benefiting Beijing, including, he says, some 500,000 displaced people, as well as broad economic set-backs to the area as a whole. However, the mayor states, at least on the record, that he is not pessimistic about Xichuan's future. He hopes that, in place of mining and other polluting industries, that his city can foster "tourism and sustainable agriculture" as eco-friendly economic alternatives. Yet he gave few concrete details about how to make these appealing notions happen.

Not far outside the city, an old farmer was sprinkling pellets from a plastic bucket on rows of green vegetable shoots. The fertilizer mixture was made from bird droppings, he said, adding that it was more effective on certain crops than commercial additives. Yet he continues to spray chemical fertilizer and pesticides on his cornfields, having never heard of the ban Pei mentioned. The man says he is open to new farming ideas, if they work. But so far, neither he nor other farmers nearby reported having been informed of any government program or support for building another, more sustainable future.

Yu Baojiang and Wang Dong'er, an elderly couple, live at the top of a steep hill overlooking the reservoir. They remain in one of the last two occupied houses of another village on the edge of the reservoir emptied out before the dam was raised. The government projected that virtually all their neighbors' homes would be submerged, but that their old brick house would be, narrowly, spared. And so, while most of the villagers were escorted to chartered buses and sent away to relocation sites, they were told to simply stay in what Wang now calls a "ghost village." Today they have less farmland, as their fields were partially submerged, and less company. "Everyone else is gone, and we are so lonely here," says Wang. How strange, she reflects, how much depends upon a seemingly arbitrary boundary: where the water line falls.

What Beijing's planners haven't anticipated is that they may not fully control the water line in the future. Engineering blueprints for the water-diversion project date back more than a decade, but China's climate is rapidly changing, as warming temperatures melt the glaciers that feed all of Asia's great rivers-including the Yangtze. Between 2002 and 2014, Chinese scientists calculate that glaciers in Tibet and Xinjiang shrunk by 13 percent. Rainfall patterns are also shifting, though scientists offer different projections as to how global warming will remap the Asian monsoon. "The weather in China has been changing," as Deborah Tan of the Hong Kong-based consultancy China Water Risk told The Guardian, "... and this is something that is beyond everyone's control."

If the original calculations that central China can afford to divert its water turn out to be wrong, that will also have long-term impacts for Cao and his neighbors. "Water is this fundamental lubricant for urban and industrial growth," says Britt Crow-Miller, a geographer at Portland State University, who conducted doctoral thesis research on the water-diversion project. "If you are transferring water away from your community, you're really transferring [away] long-term opportunity" for agriculture or future industries that depend on access to water. "So, what does it mean for these places that down the road will not have access to adequate water resources, potentially?"

Whether history judges the water-diversion project a saving grace or a supreme folly depends now on whether Beijing and the rest of northern China can use "the time that has been borrowed," as the Beijing-based environmentalist Ma Jun puts it, to significantly increase water efficiency and stem demand in the region. "Now we need to shift our priorities from expansion of the water supply to conservation," he says. "Even if the transfer will help to delay a crisis from coming, how do we use that additional time? We cannot continue the old ways of wasteful and inefficient water use. If we don't use this precious time properly, we could soon face another water crisis."

"There's still a worry that even this water transfer will not be enough to cover up the gaps in the future," Ma warns. In other words, the costly and risky project may only be a band-aid solution. "Before we attempt any future radical projects, we must be sure we have exhausted all the conservation methods possible."

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Like so many of Mao's pronouncements, it sounded simple. "The South has a lot of water; the North lacks water. So if it can be done, borrowing a little water and bringing it up might do the trick."

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Facebook Live streaming after the police shooting death of Philando Castile. Tony Webster, CC BY-SA

These events raise questions about the ethics and responsibilities of social media. They also point to a key media shift: Broadcasting live video used to be a complex technical feat, requiring television cameras, trucks and satellites. Today, the ubiquity of smartphones and social media has made "going live" as simple as tapping an app. The result has been a new world of live video - documenting society's good, bad and ugly - that challenges how we think about visual information made public in an eyewitness, even journalistic fashion.

Here are five considerations for understanding how live-streaming services like Facebook Live and Periscope challenge journalism today.

1. 'Liveness' and bearing witness

Photos and videos have an inherent realism, which audiences associate with greater authenticity. Media philosopher John Durham Peters has shown how the "liveness" of audiovisual media can accentuate that sense of authenticity, by providing a means of collective witnessing. Journalists, for example, act as witnesses to events, and audiences bear witness to news broadcasts and reports.

In July 2016, Facebook Live exposed the police killing of Philando Castile. The video served to bear witness and added to the public discussion of police brutality.

But the Castile video also illustrated the equal parts " compelling and challenging" aspects of bearing witness to live events: Videos can improve public awareness, while in some cases including material that is graphic, pornographic or pirated.

2. Visually driven content

Our cultural milieu, including news and social media, is increasingly visually oriented. The inclusion of a visual increases audience attention, and imagery can create instantaneous emotional reactions. Images are easier to recall than words, and visuals can drive humanitarian actions, though such effects are short-lived. And in a social media environment, visuals can increase engagement, which is often a key objective for users.

European Parliament

News organizations and social media platforms are well aware of these effects. Facebook, like other social media providers, designs its interface to emphasize visuals. Amid phenomenal growth in video - YouTube has more than a billion users - news and social media sites are adapting their formats and tools to capitalize, hence the development of Facebook Live.

3. Citizen reporting

Indeed, as seen in the women's march and airport protests against the Trump administration, to protest these days is to live-document it at the same time - extending one's reach beyond the protest space.

What's particularly new is this: Social networking sites - even ones like Facebook that tend to have a more private, friends-and-family orientation - increasingly are the platform for creating and sharing user-generated news, bypassing news organizations altogether. What matters more is the " spreadability " of user-created content.

4. Live video driving news

If they get enough traffic, Facebook Live videos can become objects of more formal news coverage. In effect, the social circulation itself leads to the issue being "picked up" by news organizations; that, in turn, leads to further social conversation, as in the case of Castile's death, shot live and preserved for others to see.

This is not to say that all Facebook Live videos lead to front-page news; precious few ever will. Rather, Facebook Live videos can create a cycle in which social media videos lead to mainstream media coverage of an event or issue, generating heightened public awareness - which means more people are likely to post new live videos on that topic.

5. Ethics

But it's worth reflecting for a moment on our collective responsibilities as Facebook users, live-streamers or not: What value are we deriving? How many thousands of people watched, reacted to and even commented on the live-streamed suicide of a 12-year-old? Are we really so desensitized?

Facebook begs us to become voyeurs. And while live-streamed videos can serve to enrich the human experience and educate the public, they mostly tend to trade in the ugly and profane. Are we, as the late media scholar Neil Postman famously suggested about another video medium, merely " amusing ourselves to death " with the mundane?

Final considerations

Live-streamed video muddies the intersection of Facebook and journalism. Facebook has more than a billion daily active users, with 66 percent of its users getting news from the site. That makes it, by some accounts, the leading news gatekeeper in the world.

What's clear is that live-streaming video via social media forces us to consider how we think about news - its speed, spread and defining influence in bearing witness to public life.

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These events raise questions about the ethics and responsibilities of social media. They also point to a key media shift: Broadcasting live video used to be a complex technical feat, requiring television cameras, trucks and satellites. Today, the ubiquity of smartphones and social media has made "going live" as simple as tapping an app.

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蒋旭光：南水北调34万移民问题解决不易值得深思-中新网

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丹江口库区有过多次移民搬迁经历。其中，丹江口水库工程是中国20世纪50年代开始兴建的重大工程之一，从1958年9月开始动工到1973年完成。期间，经历了多次移民搬迁。蒋旭光介绍，初期工程移民搬迁工作发生在一个特殊的年代，是在特殊的社会经济背景下进行的，移民人数38.2万人，当时人均补偿八九百元。南水北调工程开工后搬迁的34.5万移民中，约1/3属于丹江口水库初期工程老移民，人均耕地不足1亩。

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直播真的适合新闻媒体吗？关于新闻类直播的8个误区 - 热点新闻 - 科讯优网

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直播是新闻的未来吗？来自新闻一线记者、老师、学子对这个话题提供了多方视角，由方可成博士在此基础上总结了一些要点和简评，硬货十足。分享这篇文章，希望与大家探讨一下，直播这个热点，新闻媒体要不要追，怎么追？

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NASA Visible Earth: Heavy Rainfall Floods Indonesia

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NASA's Visible Earth catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet

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Today we're launching Facebook Live for everyone -- to make it easier to create, share and discover live videos. Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power...

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Post by zuck.

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Facebook really, really, really wants you to enjoy live video on Facebook. So much so that the company announced a dedicated video space on its mobile app along with several other features today in the hopes that you will watch and broadcast more videos live.

"Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page. "This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it's going to create new opportunities for people to come together."

This aggressive push to get you to watch and share live has been in the works for a while. Facebook launched its live video service last year for celebrities and public figures before offering the option of live streaming to regular people, too.

Since then, you've had the chance to hang out live as Ricky Gervais took a bath, Tony Hawk skated, Alton Brown cooked, and Lester Holt wandered around during his lunch break. We've also seen journalists broadcast from location, astronauts answer questions about space, and star athletes say hello from their locker rooms.

The company's efforts to get you to watch and broadcast live isn't arbitrary. With more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, Facebook has a real opportunity to showcase breaking news, intimate personal moments, and behind-the-scenes stories from just about anywhere in a way that surpasses TV networks and challenges incumbents like Periscope. All of which is pretty incredible.

It recognizes that power-as well as the financial opportunity it represents. Facebook is an ad-driven business capitalizing on the specialness of being in the moment. Live is, well, live. You have to be there when it happens to really be there (even if you can catch a replay later). For a company like Facebook, which wants you to spend as much of your time as possible on the service so it can show you more ads, there's no better way to get you to come back and stay than by promising live experiences you won't get anywhere else. In that way, Facebook wants to be your new, customizable TV, your way into a Super Bowl locker room, your peek behind the scenes at the Oscars, your opportunity to skydive, your very own live Truman Show -all while sitting at your desk.

But, most of all, it wants you to keep coming back.

You Can Hear the Crowd

So what's new? First and foremost, Facebook is rolling out a "dedicated place" where you can search for live and non-live videos as well as choose to broadcast for yourself. You'll be able to get there by touching a tab in the Facebook app that brings you to a video section away from your News Feed. In addition, Facebook is rolling out a geographic map, so you can see where people are broadcasting live around the world.

Little things can make a big difference. Facebook knows you might not want to broadcast your workout to your entire network. So, while Facebook has previously allowed anyone to "go live" to their friends, you can now broadcast for specific groups and events. And much like Facebook-owned Instagram, the company will let you use "filters" on live broadcasts.

Moreover, Facebook is incorporating its new Reactions ("Like," "Love," "Wow," "Haha, "Sad," and "Angry") directly into broadcasts much like Twitter's Periscope features heart reactions. Those reactions will pop up in the frame during a broadcast, then quickly disappear. "It's like hearing the crowd applaud and cheer," Fidji Simo, a Facebook product management director, said in a blog post today.

That's important, Facebook says, because initial data reveals that viewers comment "more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than regular ones." Part of the fun of live videos, after all, is the real-time interaction-be it with questions, opinions, or just getting a chance to tell your favorite musician "Wow."

Scarcity Is King

For Facebook, Live has its own set of challenges. When Zuckerberg went live today to talk about the new features, his page stalled for some people trying to watch (like me). In another live Q&A on Facebook (where else?) today, Chris Cox, the company's chief product officer, said that Facebook has more than a hundred people working on Live. He explained that Facebook needs to be able to serve up millions of simultaneous streams without crashing (ahem), including some where perhaps millions are watching, as well as seamless streams across different devices and service providers around the world. (So far, Live has only launched in 60 countries.) "It turns out it's a really hard infrastructure problem," Cox said.

So, why is Facebook putting so much energy into live broadcasting? Don't most people look goofy anyway? For one, video has become central to Facebook. In the past few years, Facebook has increasingly prioritized video in News Feed, and we've all dutifully watched. In the past, Zuckerberg has explained it by saying that he believes we're moving toward more immersive experiences online, and that moving images are more immersive than text.

"It's a significant investment in a new media type," says Brian Blau, a longtime personal technologies researcher at Gartner. "It gives users another way to interact with one another, and it gives brands another way to interact with their customers." In its early days, Facebook didn't even allow people to post photos. But today, serving up all kinds of media is crucial for the company.

So, live video is the next logical extension of video, but there's also something crucially special about "live." It's an intimate experience, and you have to be there when it happens. If you're a San Francisco Giants fan, for example, you will be at your TV (or digital stream) when they're playing. You just will. If you're a huge Beyoncé fan, you'll do whatever you can (and pay pretty much whatever you must) to get tickets to see her when she comes to your city on tour.

Facebook wants to create those same kinds of "must-be-present" experiences. "In a digital economy the one thing that is scarce is something that's live," says Tim Mulligan, a longtime video analyst for MIDiA Research. "If you have a live streaming event, that's scarce by its very nature."

When I stream or you stream (sorry!) we're probably not going to generate the kind of "must-see hype" Facebook wants, but it reportedly has a plan to get celebrities and media companies in on the live action by paying them. That may hint at the Facebook's future. Imagine if Facebook one day streams live sports games, live music festivals, or even live Q&As (like Reddit IAmAs) with really interesting people. Imagine, too, the advertising opportunities for companies to, say, sponsor a one-time-only live event or to stream a celebrity spokesperson using their products. Live could become a reason to sign onto Facebook, and Facebook's hoping it's another reason to stay.

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Zuckerberg Really Wants You to Stream Live Video on Facebook

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Facebook really, really, really wants you to enjoy live video on Facebook. So much so that the company announced a dedicated video space on its mobile app along with several other features today in the hopes that you will watch and broadcast more videos live. "Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket.

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Communication as Culture, Revised Edition

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In this classic text, James W. Carey maintains that communication is not merely the transmission of information; reminding the reader of the link between the words "communication" and "community," he broadens his definition to include the drawing-together of a people that is culture.

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People who stream live video from their mobile phones can be a compelling example of citizen journalism. But it is not always clear if and when a live streamer can actually be called a citizen journalist. Just because someone pulls out their phone and starts streaming, does that make them a citizen journalist? It depends on what they are streaming.

One way we might identify acts of citizen journalism is by asking the following question: is the person recording something in the public interest, with the goal of sharing it with an audience now or in the future? This is not meant to be an exhaustive definition, but it does seem to be a useful rule of thumb for articulating what activities might count as citizen journalism. For example, if you are at home and decide to live stream your cat, this almost certainly is not in the public interest. But if you are at a demonstration I would argue that you are indeed a citizen journalist because what you are streaming is very likely in the public interest, and streaming it demonstrates the intent to share it with an audience.

As an act of citizen journalism, live streaming has been especially compelling when used to document recent events in the US, including the community reaction in Ferguson after the grand jury decision was announced, and the widespread protests in New York after the death of Eric Garner. It is a unique medium because it is highly authentic, raw, uncut, and unprocessed. It allows the viewer to see events happen in real time through the eyes of a participant. In some ways it occupies the highest sense of technological immediacy which has resulted from faster internet speeds, pervasive data connection, and the increasingly sophisticated technology crammed into smart phones. It is as close as you can get to being there without actually being there.

And apparently I'm not the only person who finds them compelling. Based on media reports and my own informal tally of view counts, within 12 hours of the grand jury announcement live streamers using UStream and LiveStream in Ferguson racked up 4.8 million views. New York Magazine detailed some of this activity, and some of the streamers, in an article entitled " Is Livestreaming the Future of Media, or the Future of Activism? " (Chen 2014).

Live streaming is also a textbook example of what Elihu Katz called disintermediation. It cuts out the middleman that is mainstream media coverage. The big news outlet coverage of Ferguson has been criticized for its lack of understanding of the community and their portrayal of events, not least by streamers and community members themselves. As Chen noted in the New York Magazine article, "The live-streamers' other main adversary is the mainstream media. Many protesters in Ferguson can expound for hours about the problems with the media, from its obsession with 'riot porn' to its credulousness of the police perspective."

In my personal experience, watching live video of Ferguson from a news helicopter circling overhead was almost completely uninformative. It told me nothing about what was really happening, and felt weirdly removed from the very real and important events that were unfolding on the ground. But watching people gathered in anticipation of bad news and listening to the announcement through the windows of a car, watching the community start to process what the decision meant, and watching people interact with police and each other through live streaming video was extremely informative and emotionally moving. Elise Thorburn touches on the difference is this perspective in her analysis of live streamers from the Montreal student demonstrations: "For those unable to attend the demos, for those at far remove from Montreal, or for those impeded by mobility issues or familial responsibilities, the live stream gave viewers insight into the motivations, ideas, analysis, and politics of the strikers and demonstrators; and these went far beyond the mainstream media's reliance on government platitudes and shocking images of rioters smashing windows or running from tear-gas-happy police" (Thorburn 2014, 56).

It also seems that streaming video (as well as recorded video) is increasingly thought of as a way to combat the growing power inequality between the state and citizens. There is a line of thinking that police are less likely to harm citizens, especially through the use of illegal force, if they are being recorded. Emily Bell notes that Ramsey Orta, who recorded the illegal chokehold used on Eric Garner, "said he always pulls his phone out if he thinks the police might arrest him, as protection" (Bell 2015). Michael Naimark asks "if a live webcaster knows the number of viewers in real time, could another Rodney King style beating be averted ('14,556 people are watching you right now!')?"

It is a very interesting question (for another blog post) as to whether the presence of video recording actually acts as a deterrent to police violence, or is an effective method of accountability when police violence occurs. This idea seems to be part of the Obama administration's advocating for the use of body cameras on police. Here is one argument that camera footage as evidence doesn't change the existing pro-police bias. Here is an argument that cameras can reduce abusive police behavior.

As compelling as live streaming video might be, one of the major challenges we face in this rapidly evolving landscape of citizen journalism is finding ways to help and protect live streamers. They are serving a vital function, often streaming from places where the mainstream media is unwilling or unable to go, but they lack all of the benefits that come from being a journalist with an institutional affiliation. As Bell notes, that includes pay, training, union membership, and the added protections that are afforded to the press. How can we properly thank or reward live streamers, and how can we make their cameras more effectively act as shields against state violence?

Bibliography

Bell, Emily. 2015. "Emily Bell's 2015 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture - Full Text." The Guardian. Accessed February 14. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/28/emily-bells-2015-hugh-cudlipp-lecture-full-text

Chen, Adrian. 2014. "Is Livestreaming the Future of Media or the Future of Activism?" Daily Intelligencer. Accessed December 15. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/12/livestreaming-the-future-of-media-or-activism.html.

Katz, Elihu. 1988. "Disintermediation: Cutting out the Middle Man." Intermedia 16 (2): 30.

Naimark, Michael. "All Live Global Video." http://www.naimark.net/projects/bigprojects/livevideo.html.

Thorburn, Elise Danielle. 2014. "Social Media, Subjectivity, and Surveillance: Moving on From Occupy, the Rise of Live Streaming Video." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11 (1): 52-63. doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.827356.

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Live Streaming and Citizen Journalism - MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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People who stream live video from their mobile phones can be a compelling example of citizen journalism. But it is not always clear if and when a live streamer can actually be called a citizen journalist. Just because someone pulls out their phone and starts streaming, does that make them a citizen journalist?

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JAKARTA (Reuters) - Heavy monsoon rain triggered severe flooding in large swathes of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Thursday, bringing the city to a halt with many government offices and businesses forced to close because staff could not get to work.

At least 20,000 people were forced from their homes in the capital and weather officials warned the rain could get worse over the next few days.

"Rain will continue to fall in the greater Jakarta area ... the potential for flooding remains," a spokesman for the Meteorology Climatology Meteorology and Geophysics Agency told Reuters. He said rain was expected to remain heavy in mountains above Jakarta, often the source of floodwater.

Four people were reported to have been killed, according to the National Disaster Prevention Agency, which urged residents to stay at home to reduce traffic congestion on blocked roads.

Torrential rain was reported across much of the country, including the main island of Java and heavily agricultural area of southern Sumatra.

However, officials said there had been no reports of any serious damage to key crops such as rice, sugar and palm oil.

An estimated more than 175 mm (7 inches) of rain fell in one part of west Jakarta between 7 a.m. and midday.

"In 30 years of my life here it has never flooded, ever. This is the very first time," said Ninuk, 30, a resident of central Jakarta.

Floods even forced the country's anti-corruption agency to move some of its most prominent prison inmates, including a former deputy head of the central bank, to a notorious women's prison, Pondok Bambu, in east Jakarta, a spokesman said

The flooding will put pressure on the capital's popular new governor, Joko Widodo, who came to office last October with promises to work to fix a huge array of basic infrastructure problems that bedevil the city of about 10 million people.

"The government has to do something to prevent floods ... If it needs to build stronger dykes, then build them," said Syaiful Bakhri, a taxi driver whose car was stuck in the flood.

In the centre of Jakarta, where streets are jammed at the best of times, long lines of idled cars waited for waist-deep water to recede. An inflatable dinghy provided by emergency services ferried people to safety across water dividing the heart of the city.

The city's main airport was open but many roads leading to it were reportedly blocked. Most commuter trains and buses were suspended.

The Jakarta Stock Exchange did open but trading was light.

Flooding was even reported at the presidential palace, forcing the postponement of a meeting between President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his visiting Argentine counterpart, Cristina Fernandez.

Additional reporting by Michael Taylor and Janeman Latul; Writing by Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by Robert Birsel

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Floods paralyze Indonesian capital, heavy rains continue

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JAKARTA (Reuters) - Heavy monsoon rain triggered severe flooding in large swathes of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, on Thursday, bringing the city to a halt with many government offices and businesses forced to close because staff could not get to work.

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Not all disasters happen at the same speed. Consider two examples.

1. Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda made landfall in the Philippines on the 8th of November. It had been identified as one of the most powerful Typhoons ever recorded only hours before. In a few hours it had killed 6,000 people and injured nearly 30,000. The typhoon displaced 4 million. By the 9th of November the storm had moved into Vietnamese and Chinese territory.

2. In July 2011 a severe drought hit the Horn of Africa. It lasted almost an entire year. By September 2012 nearly a million people had fled Somalia to camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Early warning systems first forecast the looming disaster 11 months before it hit. The massive displacement was created partly by the fact the region had been made more vulnerable by previous droughts.

Rapid-onset disaster unfold almost instantly, slow-onset disasters can be predicted much further in advance and unfold over months or even years. Rapid-onset disasters tend to create their destruction through the immediate physical impacts. Slow-onset disasters also create crises through the economic and social impacts of the disaster.
How are slow-onset disasters affected by climate change
The key question is - how are each of these disasters affected by climate change? Which of them might become worse as the planet warms? This info graphic gives a simple indication of how much each hazard will be affected by climate change, and how strong the evidence for that affect is.
Infographic: The Union of Concerned Scientists, based on information from the IPCC
How do slow-onset disasters affect migration, how is it different from rapid-onset?
We can analyse this by looking at how slow and rapid-onset disasters create different kinds of human movement.

Do they both create forced movement?
Yes. This is the most obvious similarity. People are forced to move by both kinds of disasters. In our two earlier examples (Typhoon Haiyan and the Horn of Africa drought) millions of people had no choice about moving. They simply had to move in order to survive.

Do they both create voluntary movement?
Sudden disasters tend not to create voluntary movement. Slow-onset disasters can create both forced and voluntary movement. The slowly unfolding pace of slow-onset disasters means that some people might choose to move, before they are forced to move later on. Often people with slightly more money or resources will leave an area as conditions get worse. Clearly this movement is not entirely voluntary. However it may leave people with more choices about when they move and where they go.

Do they both create internal movement?
Yes. In fact the vast majority of people who are affected by both rapid and slow-onset disasters move within their own country.

Do they both create cross border movement?
Slow-onset disasters are more likely to create cross border movement. For example during the Horn of Africa drought millions of people fled across international borders into neighboring countries. As we've pointed out in previous posts, this was the result of a complex web of environmental, economic and conflict drivers. During sudden disasters people tend to move short distances. They have little or no time to collect possessions, and often move to the nearest safest place.

"The water came at night and we didn't have time to save our belongings; we had to chose whether to save our children and ourselves or our property and assets, so we chose to save our kids. We left everything and ran to save our lives."
Unnamed survivor of the 2010 floods (World Food Programme)

There are circumstances in which rapid-onset disasters might influence the choices of migrants who are already outside their own country. For example a large number of people from the Philippines work overseas, and the Typhoon will have affected their decisions about if and when to return.

What about permanent and temporary movement?
People affected by slow and rapid-onset disasters often express a deep desire to return, as do many people displaced by factors other than disasters. People fleeing both kinds of disasters often do return. In the case of slow-onset disasters like drought, people will often return when conditions improve. With rapid-onset disasters people will often return quickly to take part in reconstruction. This can leave both groups vulnerable if the same disaster strikes again.

Some kinds of slow-onset disasters might be permanent, and might create permanent displacement. For example sea level rise is already creating permanent movement away from low lying areas. Desertification in many cases is not reversed and creates situations where farming may not be possible again. In these circumstances the movement may be permanent rather than temporary.

Some kinds of slow-onset disasters may create seasonal and circular migration. For example if altered rainfall patterns make farming less profitable people may move during dryer periods and then return as conditions change. People might also seek work elsewhere during quieter parts of the agricultural year, and then return when more work is available.

Cover and thumbnail image: Martijn Munneke (CC BY 2.0)
Alex Randall coordinates the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition. He is author several reports on migration and climate change. He writes regularly on migration, displacement and climate change for a number of outlets.

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Understanding a slow disaster: getting to grips with slow-onset disasters, and what they mean for migration and displacement -

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Slow and rapid onset disasters: it's a common distinction, but what does it mean? Not all disasters happen at the same speed. Consider two examples. 1. Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda made landfall in the Philippines on the 8th of November. It had been identified as one of the most powerful Typhoons ever recorded only hours ...

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为了执行政府一项保护"三江源"的工程，有5万多藏族牧民离开草原，开始集中居住。三江源生态移民这样一项综合性社会系统工程，没有现成的经验可供借鉴。移民的生活和发展仍面临困境。关桂霞、索南旺杰报道。

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азиатский банк развития

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Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific

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Climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather events, making more geographic places inhospitable to human habitation and secure livelihoods.

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азиатский банк развития

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather events, making more geographic places inhospitable to human habitation and secure livelihoods.

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Your browser does not support the video tag.

On Wednesday evening, hundreds of chanting protesters marched fast down Tenth Avenue after a grand jury declined to indict an NYPD officer for killing Staten Island street vendor Eric Garner with a chokehold. They moved over the pavement between cars and buses, past a smiling taxi driver who gave high-fives out of his window while honking in time with chants of "Black! Lives! Matter!" There was a lot to watch. In the middle of the action, James Woods, a big, bearded white guy wearing a black hoodie and a bulky backpack, gazed into the screen of the smartphone hoisted on a monopod in front of him as if in a trance. Woods is a live-streamer who goes by the handle "James on the Internet." At that moment, around 1,500 viewers were watching the protests through his smartphone's point of view, on his Livestream.com account. The images and sounds he was broadcasting changed swiftly with the energy of the protest. At one point, Woods's stream was filled with a sea of prone bodies blanketing the surface of the West Side Highway, in what organizers called a "die-in." Then it showed the crowd chanting "we can't breathe," surrounded by hundreds of police. And then, suddenly, he headed uptown, along the empty, blocked-off road. Police were gone, except for an NYPD helicopter above, and Woods - along with the protesters he was following - moved faster. The video was unsteady but continuous: Woods's job, as he sees it, isn't to mediate imagery, but rather to vacuum up as much of it as he can.

Countless television news crews stalked the protesters through Manhattan as well, but for Woods, they were interlopers on his turf. During Thursday night's protests, he kept streaming into the early morning, eventually ending up in midtown with the last hard-core marchers, who were dispersed by an NYPD sound cannon. He'd also filmed the protests in New York over the killing of the black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which have now bled into protests over Eric Garner's killing. Woods brought his viewers along as protesters blocked the Willis Avenue Bridge in Harlem, and as thousands filled Times Square shouting, "Hands up! Don't shoot!" Each day on Twitter, viewers hit him up to find out where the protest would be that night. Over the previous ten nights, he'd racked up more than a million views on his account.

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Woods was inspired to start live=streaming by firsthand experience with the limits of the mainstream television news networks. He tells an origin story that begins with his disenchantment in 2011, while working as a producer in Atlanta for Nancy Grace's HLN show. The show was filmed in CNN's headquarters, where he could peek into the control room and watch producers stitch together broadcasts from dozens of camera feeds displayed on a bank of monitors. He watched CNN's coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests as it was made and was appalled by what he perceived as an obvious whitewashing playing out before his eyes. "You could see in one monitor the police would be violently arresting somebody, and instead they'd go to another monitor and there would be Bob. And Bob would be three blocks away, and there'd be like ten hippies behind him, and he'd be like, 'Nothing happening here, Steve, back to you!'" Woods soon visited the encampment of Occupy Atlanta, told them he worked in television, and asked how he could help get the word out.

Since then, livestreaming has come into its own as a raw alternative to cable news' slick packaging and personality-driven coverage. The unrest in Ferguson was the medium's watershed moment - at its height, more than a half-dozen dedicated streamers tracked the protests, including both independent activists and corporate feeds from Vice and Fusion. Live-streams from the Ferguson protests on a single service - Livestream.com - attracted 1.5 million views the day of the grand jury decision that let police officer Darren Wilson off the hook without an indictment.

Livestreaming isn't just popular: It also lies smack in the middle of the contradictions that accompany a highly politicized spectacle like Ferguson in the age of social media. It's protest as reality show, or maybe reality show as protest. It offers hours of unvarnished footage that seems more authentic than cable news , but live-streamers tend to be so closely linked to the movements they cover that they become protagonists in the story they tell . And to some of the live-streamers' dismay, their success at raising the profile of their issue attracts the very forces of Establishment media (with its attendant narrative-shaping and sound-bite-seeking) whom they believe it's their mission to counteract.

With things relatively quiet in Ferguson since the grand jury decision, the center of protest over police killings of black men has shifted to the Garner demonstrations in New York City. Woods and about a half-dozen other New York City-based streamers have been documenting the protests, and late last week, three prominent live-streamers flew to New York from Ferguson to follow the action as well. The Ferguson crew includes the activist live-streamer John "Rebelutionary_Z" Ziegler, who has been living in Ferguson, on and off, since August 19. He has filmed many turbulent protests, but he'd never feared for his life as he did on his first night in Ferguson, more than a week after Brown's killing, he says. The small suburb of St. Louis was already front-page news, seized by the first wave of chaotic protests that involved looting and arson and a spectacularly militarized police crackdown, when Ziegler drove down from his home in Rockford, Illinois. Just before midnight, Ziegler was walking with some protesters and media through the streets of Ferguson, broadcasting to his Ustream account from his iPhone, when an officer pointed his rifle at a protester in front of him and threatened, "I will fucking kill you! Get back!" Ziegler demanded to know the officer's name. "Go fuck yourself," he said. Ziegler taunted the man, repeatedly calling him "Officer Go Fuck Yourself." The video went viral, and the officer, Ray Albers, a lieutenant with the St. Ann, Missouri, police, was forced to resign. Ferguson was clearly the place to be for anyone who believed, like Ziegler, in the power of live web video to help change the world. He soon moved to Ferguson full-time, and he quickly developed an audience. At the height of the action, Ziegler had as many as 40,000 viewers watching live, or nearly 10 percent of MSNBC's prime-time viewership.

But when I landed in St. Louis on November 25 , the night after the announcement that Darren Wilson would not face charges for killing Michael Brown, Ziegler sent me an urgent text. "DO NOT GO TO FERGUSON! ... Texts and other messages are not looking good/safe. Another media person was just carjacked ... " Ziegler told me to meet him instead in Shaw, a St. Louis neighborhood 13 miles south of Ferguson that had become a secondary hub of anti-police protest, after cops killed another black teenager there this fall.

I found a crowd of about 20 people marching up and down the sidewalk on a main thoroughfare, chanting, "Whose streets? Our streets!" and "Hands up! Don't shoot!" All eyes were on Ferguson, but Ziegler dutifully filmed the Shaw protesters, gripping a monopod attached to his iPhone in the middle of the crowd as they took the street. They could only block one lane of traffic, but that was enough to prompt two dozen police in riot gear to rush across the street and drive them back onto the sidewalk with threats of arrest. The dramatic response to their puny crew amused Ziegler, who noted to his viewers that it was the cops, not the protesters, who were blocking the most traffic that night.

The crowd made its way back to MoKabes, a local coffee shop that functions as the protests' southerly headquarters. The night before, after the grand jury decision was announced, police shot tear gas into the street in front of MoKabes to disperse protesters, and it seeped into the shop. If you were watching Ziegler's live-stream, you could have followed him as he dodged rubber bullets in the gas-fogged street, then rushed into MoKabes and down into the basement where protesters were forced to take shelter.

That evening, a racially diverse crowd of activists sat at tables warming themselves with free coffee and recharging their phones. Among them was Leigh "Short Stack" Maibes, a live-streamer who lived in the neighborhood. Ziegler was crashing at her house. He'd taught her how to live-stream and they had since become an informal team, often going out shooting together. Maibes, who is white, believes this role is the best one she can play. "I would prefer to be behind the camera than on the camera, " she explains, "because I believe that that's a space that should belong to black leadership."

Now Maibes scrolled through her Twitter feed, grimacing and shaking her head. The reports from Ferguson were like something from a war zone, all fire and tear gas, and her viewers wanted to know why she wasn't there to give them a front-row seat on the action. Live-streamers have an intimate, sometimes fraught, relationship with their viewers. Most rely on donations collected on crowd-funding sites like Fundrazr and Indiegogo, and their audience functions as a sort of crowd-sourced production team and assignment editor. Viewers offer tips about police and protester movement and help moderate the chat fields embedded in the feeds. Maibes knew she needed her viewers' support, but tonight, exhausted after two weeks of awaiting the grand jury decision and halfway through another sleepless night of streaming in Shaw, she was frustrated by their nagging.

Eventually, she called a protester in Ferguson to see if there were any chance of streaming there. "How bad is it up there?" she said. "You can't get it in? That's what I thought. That's what I was telling people! I've got so many people complaining that I'm not up there. But I'm not going to go around shooting riot porn. My whole thing is filming police interactions with protesters. That's not what this is. This is people setting things on fire." She hung up. Ziegler told her not to worry about the haters. "Those people are just jerks," he said.

The rise of livestreaming as a form of news coverage can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and 2012. The journalist Tim Pool, now the director of innovation at Fusion, began to stream live from Zuccotti Park and the countless demonstrations that swept New York City that fall and winter. Pool's stream became a way for Occupy sympathizers from around the country to virtually experience the atmosphere of the encampment. It was also a symbol of the movement's tech savvy. As Occupy grew into the biggest political story of the winter, Pool became a minor celebrity in his own right. When the NYPD violently evicted protesters from the Zuccotti Park encampment early on the morning of November 15, Pool was the only journalist broadcasting live pictures from inside the park.

For Ziegler and many other live-streamers working today, this was a formative demonstration of the medium's power to present an alternative view. "He had the world up for like 12 hours watching that," says Ziegler. More than 750,000 people tuned into Pool's stream that day. "I kind of said to myself, maybe that's what I can do. Maybe that's my place in a movement like this, to see if I can help out." Ziegler began livestreaming at Occupy Chicago and other leftist demonstrations in the area. In 2012, he was arrested while streaming the NATO summit protests. The video shows him disappearing beneath a heap of riot police. "They threw me on the ground and put knees to my neck and started punching and kicking me on the side. All this for filming," he says. Shaken by the experience, he put down his phone and took a break from streaming, until Ferguson.

"When Ferguson happened, I was up all night watching the live-streams; I was on Twitter helping spread information. After about a week, I couldn't handle it anymore. I knew they were lacking independent coverage to show what was happening," he says. He quit his retail job at an agricultural-supply store and moved to Ferguson.

The form is well suited to an event like Ferguson, which practically demands you choose a side before engaging with it. A live-stream is limited by what the streamer can physically access in real time, and so the most compelling streams are often produced by sympathetic participants, rather than outside journalists. Ziegler, for instance, has won the trust of the activists on the ground in Ferguson. As an unabashed supporter, he can get shots mainstream media can't. He specifically tries not to broadcast information that would harm protesters. For instance, he decided not to stream a secret meeting in which activists discussed their upcoming action.

Ferguson organizers welcome his presence and see live-streamers as a useful tool - combination bullhorn and insurance policy. "They provide a way for people to watch us and protect us," says DeRay Mckesson, a prominent protester who runs a daily Ferguson newsletter. "We get nervous when live-streamers aren't there." Viewers fashion themselves into far-flung cop-watchers and will clip videos for use in potential legal cases. Antagonists of Ferguson activists have also started clipping videos that they claim show protester illegality in order to forward them to authorities. One Ustream user who goes by the handle " simply rebroadcasts activist streams while providing his own running commentary urging police to arrest the lawbreakers. Nothiefsallowed"

If the live-streamers' reality show has a villain, it's the cops. Ziegler, whose live-stream is cross-posted to the police watchdog site the Free Thought Project in exchange for a small stipend, sees one of his jobs as holding police accountable. In October, Maibes's boss at the Re/Max brokerage where she works as a real-estate agent received a call from a St. Louis police officer named Keith Novara. Novara claimed he simply wanted to give her a "heads up" that she might be getting some angry calls about Maibes's activism. Maibes saw this as intimidation. She called the officer back and confronted him on speakerphone while Ziegler filmed the conversation. She uploaded it to YouTube and filed a complaint with the St. Louis Police, which opened an investigation.

But no streamer has produced more viscerally effective, if questionably sensible, confrontations with police than Bassem Masri , a local St. Louis live-streamer and activist and the object of a fair amount of bad press for his provocations against media and police. When things get heated, he has tended to hurl outrageous vitriol at the cops, daring them to react with force. In one well-circulated clip, he informs officers trying to control a protest that he's praying for their death. Masri boasted the largest viewership of all the live-streamers in Ferguson, at least until his phone was stolen in the middle of a protest on the night of the grand jury decision. Ninety thousand viewers watched the perpetrator sprint with the phone down the street and overheard him boast to his friend of the heist before the feed went dead. (Masri was in jail the entire time I was in St. Louis. )

The live-streamers' other main adversary is the mainstream media. Many protesters in Ferguson can expound for hours about the problems with the media, from its obsession with "riot porn" to its credulousness of the police perspective . Interrupting CNN broadcasts with a chant of "Fuck CNN" has become a sort of nationwide meme post-Ferguson. Ziegler complains of network cameramen trampling protesters and CNN bodyguards throwing their weight around the protest zone. "The guys with big cameras couldn't give a shit about anything except getting the shot," he says, comparing his activism to what he sees as their mercenary bent. "They don't care about anything but that paycheck."

But the networks have started to take notice of live-streams as well. In the past few months, James Woods has started selling clips from his stream to television news outlets like Al Jazeera, RT, and the local ABC affiliate. "Even though the footage is lower quality, there's a certain grittiness and graininess to it that they find appealing," he says. Tim Pool has landed a series of high-profile media gigs, first at Vice and then at Fusion, for whom he covered Ferguson. The mainstreaming of livestreaming, which is certain to happen sooner or later, will probably cause angst among those who view the medium as a form of activism. Ziegler already complains that Pool has lost his edge since going corporate. "He turned his back on the protesters," Ziegler says. Pool now films from behind police lines and goes live only in short bursts, instead of the marathon sessions Ziegler sees as the essence of the form . "That's not livestreaming," he says. "That's a bit, the same thing the MSM is doing." I ran into Pool briefly in Ferguson and asked him what he thought about the proliferation of live-streamers there . He said it was mind- boggling to see the growth of the medium, but that the streamers in Ferguson were "less serious journalism, more wanting to show their point of view."

The epicenter of the most recent protests in Ferguson - the main battleground for both the protesters and the media - has been a stretch of concrete in front of the spotless police department headquarters. I went there to meet Maibes and Ziegler in the afternoon the day after the Shaw protest. We were joined by a black woman who was so enthusiastically pro-protester that I thought she was one, until she said she was a freelance photographer, and two white twentysomethings from Kansas City, one skinny and adenoidal, the other wearing a T-shirt that read "Smash the Cis-tem." A reporter and cameraman in matching red parkas were shooting a bit for an evening news package at the very moment we passed by. They stood in front of a decorative waterfall surrounded by a patch of loose, fist-size stones. The reporter bent down to pick up a stone and hefted it. He said, "Last night, the protests turned violent, with protesters throwing anything they could get their hands on."

Ziegler's head whipped around with an abruptness that would have been accompanied by a record scratch in a movie. The group diverted from the sidewalk, surrounded the reporter and his cameraman, and began hurling complaints about the reporter's slanderous portrayal of the protesters. The guy in the Smash the Cis-tem shirt slid wordlessly into the narrow gap between the cameraman and the reporter, blocking the shot and smiling goofily into the lens.

The reporter, Josh Marshall from Kansas City's KCTV5, glanced skeptically at the self-issued press badge dangling from Ziegler's neck. He tried to explain that he was just reporting on what he and his cameraman had seen happen last night. Ziegler raised his voice. "But what it does is it bleeds anyone who isn't doing that with the 20 or 30 people who are doing that shit," he said. Marshall pointed at the rocks.

"I watched 100 or 200 people come down here last night and threaten our lives, and throw rocks - "

"Threaten your lives because you talk shit like this, you piece of shit!" Ziegler was now yelling.

"All right, wait, wait," Maibes said, trying to calm things down. A producer, via earbud, told the reporter to kill the shot, and the cameraman lowered his rig. Marshall sighed and seemed to relax a bit.

"All right. Now that I'm not working, I'll listen to what you have to say," he said. Ziegler began to deliver his standard condemnation of the mainstream media, complaining that they swoop in to cover the protests and looting as if this were the whole story of Ferguson. He said that every time protesters turned violent, it was in response to police trying to clamp down with force. The freelance photographer described the daily injustices faced by black people, the years of oppression and racism, that lay at the root of the protesters' anger. "Why is this the story?" she said, pointing at the rocks. Marshall explained that he had limited airtime - the "one-and-a-half-minute package" was cited repeatedly - and couldn't include all that context. "My philosophy is: Whatever's happening, I don't want to be in the middle of it, all right?" he said. "My job is not to lose my life over a minute-and-a-half package."

"We're out here fucking 24 hours a day shooting live video that's unedited," Ziegler said in reply. "We sacrifice our lives, we sacrifice our safety to make sure that the lies the police spin and that you take and report as fact - because it's the police and they must not be lying - we are here to counter that narrative. And you just eat it up. And when you're not doing that, you just make it about yourself. Like, My life was in danger, so fuck these people when they get gassed tonight."

By now, the conversation had gone on for 20 minutes and Marshall, perhaps sensing his cameraman's increasingly wistful glances in the direction of the parking lot, said he had to go.

"I have a question," said the freelance photographer. "Did any of this change how you feel?" Marshall looked her straight in the eyes. "I gave you 20 minutes, and I can say that it's the best 20 minutes I've spent in Ferguson over the past 72 hours," he said with conviction. "Fair enough? Seriously." Ziegler thanked Marshall for the dialogue and apologized for his earlier outburst. "I'm emotional right now and I'm a little fed up, and I apologize," he said. Marshall and the cameraman walked away as the photographer called out, "Be safe!"

I asked the skinny protester if he believed Marshall had really been affected by the conversation. He said he did. "If he was that good of a liar he wouldn't be working for KCTV," the protester said. "He'd be working for CNN."

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Is Livestreaming the Future of Media or the Future of Activism?

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On Wednesday evening, hundreds of chanting protesters marched fast down Tenth Avenue after a grand jury declined to indict an NYPD officer for killing Staten Island street vendor Eric Garner with a chokehold. They moved over the pavement between cars and buses, past a smiling taxi driver who gave high-fives out of his window while honking in time with chants of "Black!