The view is hazy. The camera jostles. Snipped images bounce from one mad corner to another. Some guy’s face is obstructed by the angle of his own arm. I dare say this is the future of journalism in the twenty-first century, a time in which commercialized arenas of media can’t be trusted and we rely on the shaky hands of some amateur traveler for the truth. Welcome to the age of the citizen soldier/artist.

He is a brave man who runs up and down burning streets of Lhasa armed with a pair of shades, some Sony contraption, and the sneakers on his feet. Indeed they better be sneakers, because he is doing a lot of running, both from Tibetan rioters and the People’s Liberation Army of China. He is up against the perils of an all-out revolt, determined to document reality for the sake of reality itself (and some spare minutes of fame on YouTube). And we meet him because he is only a citizen. A tourist really. His accent gives him away.

There is tons of footage online, and all one should do is type in “Tibet.” No need to capitalize even. The only ones capitalizing off this availability are the strangers whose heads are in some shots and the average viewer, depending on his slant. One might see an image of a man being dragged away by police, but truth be told we are unsure if he’s being whisked away to an ambulance or hauled off to a cell. We can’t tell if the soldiers are Chinese or Nepalese (sad, I know) and we really shouldn’t assume that the tanned man throwing a stone is a freedom fighter.

Also on YouTube, to remind us of our uncertainty in deciphering video, are 5-minute flashes of text in poor grammar and usually the flag of Mother China. This brand of videos wishes to inform us of the “western media’s” bias against the Chinese. It wants us to see the indisputable evidence, that Tibet was, is, and always will be a part of China, and no amount of CIA-funding or Dalai-Lama-praising can change that. The text in the video is often sarcastic, angry, accusatory, and aggrandized by dramatic music in the background.

What they don’t show us are concrete photos by international press sources reporting from Tibet, namely because the Chinese government forbids them. In Beijing, news censors are hard at work blacking out any programming that even makes mention of the situation in Tibet, and Internet searches and forums are censored, too. The popular videos also don’t show us numbers, not definite figures, anyway. Sure, we get some amounts. How many years ago Tibet was signed into Chinese rule. How many different cultures and languages coexist within Chinese borders. How united and proud she is, rosy Mother China. But when some news sources report 14 fatalities as a result of the riots in Tibet, and other sources say it’s in the thousands, one can imagine there is a heavy amount of filtering and fidgeting at play here.

So whom do we trust, as concerned and globally-minded American citizens? Our own beacons of impartiality FoxNews or CNN? Do we seek out the Chinese consulate and demand answers? Do we, perhaps, listen to local students who have been in Tibet, chock full of stories to tell? We can certainly do all of these. But we can also turn to that random asshole grinning in glee as he gets the shot of a burning something in the middle of the road, Tibetans running wild like children at recess, hungry for a revolution and the freedom to choose feudalism if they want to. We can hardly make out that figure on our laptop screens, and we may not know who he is exactly, but we can be sure he is some other human fed up with the system, sick of the censorship, eager to have his story heard. Unfortunately, he believes we hear through violence. I still believe we learn through art.