The End Of The World - brought to you by Citizen Journalists

Rob: Still filming?
Hud: Yeah, people are gonna want to know... how it all went down.

Cloverfield is an interesting flick if only in the sense that it demonstrates when systems crash on a large scale, resources are disrupted or no longer in place, and emergency systems - backups - then usurp the behemoths because micro-systems (a man and his phone)can operate on minimum level resources. Critically low capacities basically enable the 'citizen journalist' to begin to come into his/her own.

Hud: Rob, it is time to leave the electronic store.

In Cloverfield one scene is particularly noteworthy: all these looters are standing around in an electronics store watching CNN on plasma screens while outside, missiles and and plumes of dust fly into the air. At a certain point CNN is no longer there. Almost nothing remains.

Beth McIntyre: [sees monster] What is that?
Hud: It's a terrible thing.
[while trying to get to a flight of stairs, Rob encounters a parasite and kills it]
Beth McIntyre: Oh my God! What is that?
Hud: I don't know! Something else! Also terrible.


But future scenarios of war and intense degradation will probably not be broadcast on CNN or by any number of major networks. They will be captured on cellphones and the like, and broadcast on the internet - whatever is available - via VPNs, or through various forms of video and or radio streaming.

This will only happen when a tipping point is reached where people begin to find that large media companies can no longer represent/save them from what is happening on the ground where they are.

Hud: Okay, so, just to be clear here: our choices are we die in here, die in the subway, or die on the streets. That right?
Rob Hawkins: Yeah... that's about right.

To some extent - I sometimes think - this may already be true, we're just too distracted to notice.

Marlena Diamond: [as rats run through her feet in the subway] Oh god, this is nasty. This is disgusting.
Hud: They're all running in the same direction
Rob: Ya, like they're running away...
Lily Ford: From what?