When Libya’s recently-deposed longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi was “killed like a dog” on Thursday, many other things died — or became seriously ill.

One of them was journalism.

Journalism nearly became history. Some chap who was with the rebels in Sirte captured footage of the chaotic, but dramatic, seizure of Gaddafi and his bloody end.

Al Jazeera got it, and broadcast it as “exclusive.”

Before long, other international broadcasters were using the same footage, attributing it as Al Jazeera material.

By that time, the footage had, of course, been posted on the video-sharing site You Tube.

If you wanted all the gory details of the end of Gaddafi virtually as it happened, You Tube was the place to be. The TV networks had smart commentators and offered some good context, but their footage was too yesterday.

Something is happening here.

Because the foot soldiers of the Arab Uprising that ousted Tunisia’s strongman Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s despot Hosni Mubarak early this year mobilised and kept the world informed of their struggles via social media sites Facebook and Twitter, there was talk of the “revolution being tweeted.”

Perhaps, Gaddafi’s demise suggests that history will be You Tubed, because that grainy footage of his end shot by a revolutionary’s mobile phone might be the only such record of that moment.

Now there are a few other Big Men in Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia who could end up like Gaddafi.

Though I abhor mob justice and capital punishment, I still want the next video of any of these dictators being dragged out of the drainage pipe in which they are hiding and being shot in the head, to be of higher quality than Gaddafi’s.

Also, if a lot of the most important video footage of our times is going to come from citizens shooting with their mobile phones and cameras, then we desperately need global universal access to top range smart phones, digital cameras, and broadband for the masses of the world.

As the masses recorded the grim drama in Sirte, the commentariat on TV were discussing, among other things, what happens in Libya next.

Many suggested there was a real danger of the grouping of rebel groups, the National Transitional Authority, breaking up into tribal factions. With Libya flooded with arms as it is, the general view was that an Iraq-style civil war was a real possibility.

The story in Libya will be if it doesn’t break up, not if it does.

This is because, from the Soviet Union, Iraq, to Sudan, history teaches us that if one party, one family, one ethnic group, or one religion lords it over a country for more than 35 years and it loses power to a popular uprising or in an attack by a stronger foreign power, the country rarely holds together.

In addition, all the demons that were buried through repression, rather than a democratic consensus, also tend to rise from the dead, as is happening now with the Muslim-Coptic clashes in Egypt.

So fully expect Libya to go through a lot of pain before it stabilises.

The real miracle will be if it doesn’t break up. Whatever happens, you are likely to read it first on Twitter or see it on You Tube.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: [email protected]