On hearing about the Boston Marathon bombs, the first place I visited was Reddit. There I knew exactly what I'd see: first hand reports from people live on the ground along with uncensored videos and pictures of what was going on. Many thousands of people from all over the world did likewise. This is arguably the first major terrorist attack in the Western World to be live-captured on social media using mobile devices and have the whole planet watching. What will the fallout be?

But first a quick history lesson

When 9/11 happened, I was sitting in my home in Sendai, Japan, frantically refreshing my football message board with Japanese TV news in the background. Fans of my football team, scattered around the world, had access to a myriad of news sources and posted updates online as they appeared. Sites like the BBC had collapsed under an unprecedented barrage of requests for updates. As such I was left looking at a text-based message board which turned out to be one of the best up-to-the-minute news aggregators in the world at that time.

The London bombings of July 2005 saw many home-brew pictures circulate but the majority of memorable images still appeared through the London-based media. While social media existed, we still lived in a pre-iPhone world and mobile broadband wasn't too hot.

Only months before, communication networks had been a major sore point in the Indian Ocean Tsunamis tragedy and coverage of the event, plus lack of high-tech, metropolitan conurbations meant coverage was limited despite the enormous size of the affected area.

Things started to change with the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunamis in Japan. As I watched live footage of the wave rolling across the coast of my old home town - towards houses where my friends lived - two things went through my mind; firstly, I hoped they were aware of what was coming right for them and secondly that we were likely to end up with some awe-inspiring live footage of the disaster thanks to a gazillion Japanese cameras and camcorders which every person of every age, in the area, seemed to own. To this day you can still find stunning tsunamis videos which you won't have seen before. There are that many of them.

The Arab Spring was born largely from social media, but the content was more to do with organising protests and spreading the word than highlighting horror. In fact, the social media coverage was arguably a large reason for the general lack of bloodshed during the revolutions.

But in all of the above cases, most distant-observers will have been spared the gritty reality and real horror of what happened on the ground. While some will have seen live footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers to avoid burning to death - which seemed to be shown before the news teams realised what was happening - if there are grizzly images of the aftermath, they aren't widespread and I have no interest in looking to see if they exist.

We don't see much about the reality of war. These days, embedded journalists are routinely censored by the armed forces they are moving with and even then, the news networks will ensure that viewers are kept away from the realities of what happens on the front lines and in roadside bombs. This largely stems from the Vietnam war where photographs from people like Nick Ut (naked napalm girl) helped change public opinion about the war and subsequently helped lead to its cessation. We don't see that too often these days despite more cameras and technology than ever before. Wikileaks famously showing footage of civilians being torn apart by a distant Apache gunship is arguably an exception that proves the rule - the fallout from that leak is still the source of an international incident. Still, the footage was grainy enough to leave viewers feeling distant and disengaged.

Long-term internet denizens will likely have seen some kind of gore by now, whether they've wanted to or not. Whether its car crash victims, crime scene images or hostages being decapitated, it's all online and locatable with minimal effort. A real gap in sensibilities has developed between those au fait with the internet and those who still can't program a VCR (or even own one).

But it's arguably today that many people will, for the first time, have seen the very grizzly reality of what REALLY happens when a bomb goes off in a crowd. Websites like the ABC have many pictures and videos of the events, and they were up within minutes - largely thanks to social media.

But Reddit had the lot. Uncensored. And what was posted was truly horrible. People with their legs blown off, casualties, dead and alive, scattered on a bloody ground. All on the one website which arguably has recently started to live up to its moniker of being 'The Front Page of The Internet.'

When the Aurora cinema shootings happened last July, this post hit the front page instantly:

Someone came into our theater at the midnight release of Dark Knight Rises and began opening fire. Who here on Reddit can help me calm my nerves?

When the Marathon bombs went off, Live Update threads like this appeared but arguably more poignant were first-hand account posts like this from 99trumptes in the r/running subreddit.

For those who don't know about Reddit, it's been around for years but only recently emerged to become arguably the most influential, centralised social media site of all. It has kept to the basics throughout this time and the resulting simplicity has proved attractive to people of all ages and all backgrounds. The general level of anonymity means people can be having conversations with children, celebrities, parents, grand-parents, soldiers, police and every type of person from every walk of life, without realising it. It's an amazing social environment where nobody is pre-judged on account of who they are, where they are from, how old they are, what they look like and what they do - everything that is said is taken at face value.

There are many different sections which cover almost every special interest or subject you can imagine. Popular ones include gaming, technology and places where women go to show off their bodies plus kittens, internet memes, works of art, gore, general WTF, law, country-specific homepages and everything inbetween. All of these are called subreddits. When people post to these, other people upvote them or downvote them and the highest-scored posts rise to the top - whether it's a link to an article, a picture, a question or a Q&A with celebs of the stature of Arnold Schwarzenegger or President Obama.

The top-voted stories across the site hit the front page and for a while, in the past 24 hours, the Reddit front page became a microcosm of the entire internet: news, gore, naked ladies, cartoons, cats and gadgets, all next to each other on one page.

Many of the posts were related to the Marathon and many contained the raw, gruesome pictures that you won't see in traditional media. As such, many normal people (especially those who just like funnies and small, furry animals) would have lost their innocence today and seen what the realities of lethal force really look like.

The media

New visitors to Reddit, who stick around for a few days, will start noticing that posts are increasingly-likely to appear in the wider media a few days later. This trend is increasing rapidly and has already drawn observations along the lines of 'mainstream media is slitting its own throat.' After all, why use the same old traditional media when the original source can be guaranteed to be found on Reddit first? Twitter will always be fastest, but you can miss items if you're not following the right people. The important posts stick to Reddit. If you want the measure of a relevant news site, its posts are the ones that are regularly upvoted on Reddit. I'm happy to report that the ABC does very well in this area.

Indeed, there's a symbiotic relationship here: it's not all one-way traffic. An increasing number of mainstream sites now build Reddit upvote and downvote buttons into pages in an effort to get a boost in traffic from being listed. In 2011 my mild-mannered article titled, "The Case for Piracy" became the most-viewed, word-based article on the entire ABC when it hit the front page of Reddit and received over 400,000 visitors accordingly. For three days the whole of ABC Online was knocked slightly off it's axis by just this one article thanks to Reddit. Not surprisingly, many journalists now try and game the system in an effort to boost eyeballs. But few communities are as resilient to shameless self-promotion as Reddit is.

After today, one suspects that the secret (if it is one) is out and a significant number of people will have visited the site for the first time. What will the effect of experiencing uncensored news (for the first time) be like for these people? Will moderate, mild-mannered folk think differently about lethal force and disasters from now on? How does it affect the future of traditional media which can't compete for speed of breaking news (unless they themselves are the news breakers)? Could this be a turning point for social media versus traditional media and, if so, what will the consequences be? Will the roll of traditional media change? What about the values and sensitivities of society itself?

Community law enforcement

Today saw another potential first - an FBI Redditor asked for everyone with any footage from before, during and after the bombings to send everything they had to the Boston FBI. Considering the history of Reddit and its dealing with law enforcement (it frequently organises protests against proscriptive internet freedom laws and highlights police corruption) the number of upvotes showed that a significant chunk of the community got behind the request. Shortly afterwards the Actual Advice Mallard internet meme appeared on the front page with this message.

A turning point for law enforcement and national security perhaps? Could the cops start engaging with the internet-based public via memes?

Nothing lasts long on a Reddit front page and, at the time of writing (though probably for the bulk of the foreseeable future), already the talk has moved back to funnies, cat pictures, artwork, tech and general WTF. Only this time, while the posts might not stick around, I suspect that many new visitors will.