BUFFSCAN
BuffScan Sucks, But That's Why It's Brilliant
12/16/2023
I kind of had an epiphany about BuffScan.
Blogs or any social media effort by a single individual, even if maximized to an impressive level in trying, will never equal the capabilities of large production media companies.
The reasons for that are fairly obvious. Individuals typically need to pay attention to their families, health, jobs, and just plain old day to day survival -- not to the crafting of a dependable commercial-grade information or even editorial resource that such a blog like this one, may imply itself as.
And that line of thinking always bothered and de-spirited me.
Until now. I realized this week that I wasn't thinking holistically enough about the entire form and purpose of blogging, and in particular, as it relates to the freedom to know, inquire, and report on, dramatic events as encountered by regular people like you and I.
It fell on me like a ton of bricks: I'm not supposed to know it all. I'm not supposed to be the sole aggregator. For the very sake of the very cause and purpose I am promoting and developing at BuffScan, I'm not even supposed to be particularly outstanding or consistent.
What I'm supposed to be is merely this: Charged.
All of us engaged in the necessary free-form collection and distribution of news and drama outside profit control, political control, and so on, need only be charged to conduct these activities.
Charged means you won't run a media empire built on your voice and efforts. Charged means you will instead activate when you are absolutely in the most capable position to do so. And when you do, that kernel of perspective that you contribute as the result, is the actual hive representing in its totality an information stream supported and maintained by others operating in exactly the same capacity.
Here is an example where this holistic principle played out successfully without me even realizing it until all of this introspection.
The X post depicted above was the result of me being tipped off by the police scanner of a stabbing within my so-designated "response zone" -- an imaginary radius around me where I feel somewhat obligated to the cause to attempt media collection of public safety events, in the event I become cognizant of them.
Today that cognizance is typically through a police scanner. But, as that is becoming a less and less viable source, I am envisioning a day when it becomes the result of being dispatched by a civilian public radio network utilizing local spotters (remember the ultimate goal is to replace police scanning). And that's important to mention here because in the case of the X posting above, that's sort of what happened.
The shooting even that X post above relates to was also mentioned in a separate X post by Tonawanda Fire. I am not sure of the linkage of events necessarily but imagine that everything came together in this fashion for sake of argument: Tonowanda Fire intercepted the call and broadcast it out via their own X feed. Another member of the "live response community" -- me specifically here -- was charged and in position, technologically and with respect to proximity, to respond, collect the media, and to distribute.
Appreciate the bigger picture of that seemingly mundane exchange. Two members of the live-response community acted together spontaneously to fulfill a complete media picture for society while neither one of us actually is or is even capable of being any one person's reliable "notification and news network" for similar events on any ongoing basis. Both myself and Tonowanda Fire Alert were charged and "at the ready" and while there is no promise of consistent content via either of our forums (me BuffaloScan, and Tonowanda Fire, X) that content was captured and circulated.
In that light, no, BuffScan or any blog or effort of its ilk, is not diminished. Truth be told, it is a patently clear example of why individual platforms in the form of blogs and openly personally produced web pages should never have acquiesced to large commercial ones. We're all supposed to have just kernels of perspective and we're all supposed to be the ones in just the right place at just the right time without killing ourselves to be omnipresent.
The takeaway for myself I feel is useful to anyone reading this. Build your blog. Adopt your own "response radius", and as I've said before, know how to record and distribute content as you are best able and safely able to do so. Don't worry about creating a second job or obligation for yourself in an already responsibility-saturated lifestyle. Your blog or your feed of choice will exist to activate around your kernel of capability and can even be structured as such. Already in this light, I can foresee some editorial and functional changes that I need to implement at BuffScan.
You subscribe or follow or "check in" on BuffScan for what I can produce when I can produce it. But, wholistically, you do the same for scores of others doing exactly the same thing. An exponentially as this movement grows that dynamic becomes the media force and the "replacement" to traditional police scanning.
Think about it. You'll get it. And when you do, charge!
By BuffScan for BuffScan.
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