This article (linked above) is hinting at an interesting, quite important question - if something big and bad happens, would social media be a help or a hindrance in understanding and responding (on a personal level) to it?
One answer to the question as posed by the LA Weekly is - what WAS 9/11 like in the social media age? From my memories of the time the two fairly obvious answers the piece doesn’t touch on are:
1. Everything big would go down, and be up only intermittently after the event. This may not apply to the BBC, CNN etc any more but it CERTAINLY applies to social media. On September 11 2001 the message board I was moderating, ILX, became a (if not the) main source of information for its users, because it had a very light, text-based architecture and people were cutting-and-pasting stuff when the main news sites WERE up: so “the crowd” could maintain continuity of information when an individual would find themselves blacked out*. A lot of other bulletin boards were doing very similar things. Small sites and networks would take a lot of the strain if it happened again. Duplication of information on a single platform is a real problem in a crisis (as I’ll talk about below), but duplication of information across platforms is absolutely vital.
2. The main personal commentary in the immediate aftermath of an event like 9/11 isn’t “what’s happened” but “is [x] ok?”. With social networks this becomes both more resolvable (you can update yr status with “I’m OK”) but also more problematic as there’s no clearing-house for information. The most useful people in social media will be those who can quickly mash up data to confirm individuals’ safety - on Twitter, for instance, detection of an #imok hashtag combined with people’s follower lists.
This lack of a clearing-house is the biggest shift since 2001 in the way the web operates. Web users were social in 2001, obviously, but they tended to be social around centralised spaces - bulletin boards, forums, groups. Social networks on Facebook/Twitter lines are more decentred, which is in many ways a lot more efficient but in a genuine crisis is a bit of a nightmare. A centralised social space can quickly act to organise information: again using ILX on 9/11 as an example, very quickly the moderators who were around (DG and Ned Raggett, I think) had moved to delete or streamline duplicated threads and separate discussion into information and speculation.
But on Twitter and Facebook nobody can do this: with no centralisation there’s no way of knowing if the people you’re talking to have access to the same info you do, with the result that information gets repeated. And at the individual level, news you already know is noise. One can only imagine how much this effect would be magnified in a 9/11 like scenario. If we look at the 2009 Iran Elections as an example, very quickly it was the previous generation of web tools - blogs in particular - that started coming into their own. “Publish, then filter” may well break down in crisis situations. Though my suspicion is that in the urgency of such a situation we’ll improvise solutions to these information problems that will seem obvious with hindsight. Let’s hope we don’t find out in any hurry.
