In a way, broadcasting from a cellphone is a modern day version of waving the red flag, a public warning that something is very, very wrong. “As a witness to the video, I thought this was really remarkably intelligent of her,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. “Her boyfriend has just been shot, she’s alone in the world; he was killed, she’s alone in the world. Effectively she’s screaming—but she’s using a camera.”

As with most warnings, there is a public benefit in raising awareness. “As a citizen,” says Gitlin. “She’s done me a service.”

Bautista’s choice to keep live streaming on the fringes of an active firefight was presumably driven by the conviction that he was uniquely positioned to capture the moment. But Reynold’s decision to record Castile’s death is inherently an indictment of the institutions established to document American events. As in: I must tell this story—because they will not.

Michael Eric Dyson, an author and professor of sociology at Georgetown, believes that the rise of social media-driven video footage, “Gives lie to all the major [news] outlets—with their puffy, self-important notions of objective journalism.” According to Dyson, the message to the fourth estate is, “You’ve been just as blind as anyone else,” and that, more damningly, “We’re in a culture that disbelieves black truth.”

Events of the past week have confirmed the embarrassing degree to which traditional news media has been forced to play a game of 21st-century catch-up: A story is first circulated via social networks, and only later up-streamed into the network news matrix (after which, the footage will get a second life on social media). If the fourth estate isn’t wholly irrelevant in this moment, it’s most certainly a bystander.

But the ubiquity of these videos, and the impulse to create them, isn’t just a cautionary tale of media blind spots and technology’s disruptive power. The advent of what Gitlin terms a video “scream” points to profound institutional failures. Grabbing a cellphone is a means of last resort for people who have either been marginalized or forcibly removed from systems meant to help them. Today, the cellphone isn’t being used to call for help, at least not in the literal sense: The people who use these devices to record video have despaired of the emergency responders. No neighbors or immediate community are called upon, suggesting a level of alienation that is very nearly unprecedented.

“The old story about America is that the policeman is your friend. Which is not just a message of support, but that we have institutions to take care of trouble,” Gitlin said. “But now you have two things that have opened simultaneously: People have means to create auxiliary or substitute institutions, where you’re creating a circle of citizenship that you trust. And at the same time, people have less faith that government is going to solve the problem.”