Media
Disaster Twitter, a New Wrinkle
Of all the iconic images associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the footage of then-President Bush’s fuck-me stare — delivered, now-infamously, as he was about to grace an audience of Florida school children with his best reading voice — is perhaps the most honest summation of the mixture of horror and panic that most of his fellow citizens felt as they watched the World Trade Center crumble on national television: At least for a day — and, in most cases, probably longer than that — U.S. nationals were left in the very unfamiliar position of post-national-trauma lockdown. And, though the news media did its best to service us — parked as we were in front of our TVs, with little else to do but wonder about when the next plane would hit — with a stream of reliable information, there were, naturally, a few rumor-fed hiccups in those confusing first few hours.
Lucky for us, there was no Twitter. Or Facebook. Or any other web 2.0 gadget that might have been used to turn what was already an uncomfortable level of panic into something that might have, in its ability to undo civil order, made us long for the likes of Al Haig.
Picture this: The 9/11 sequel hits. Old media either waits to source unconfirmed reports or runs them in a crush to beat both their competitor networks and the social-media machine. By now, the latter group has already produced a collective avalanche of tweets and status updates, which — in their first-person anecdotal nature — are generally inaccurate and vague, but are, nonetheless, submitted for network-viewer consumption. And as the whole thing starts to spin out of control, the first victim post shows up. Maybe it’s a heart-rending farewell. Maybe it’s a horrifying call for help. Maybe it’s a citizen’s APB for a possible attacker. Whatever it is, it gets tweeted and retweeted. And picked-up by blogger after press agency after network until the thing is ringing in the collective heads of an already frightened public. But this time it’s not a report of one-last-cell-phone-call from a doomed plane; it’s the actual thing — and it’s happening in real time.
A small-scale example of the sort of frenzy that our new media reality can create was blogged about on TechDigest this past April. There, Daniel Sung reported on the information spread associated with DIY swine-flu reporting. “There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria,” Sung wrote. “My personal favourites [sic] are the opportunist: ‘Simple cure for the new BHS (Bird/Human/Swine flu) as reported on TV last night is the drug Tamiflu…already a prescription on the market’ and the poetic: ‘In the pandemic Spanish flu of 1918-19, my Grandfather said bodies were piled like wood in our local town…swine flu = danger.’”
This is not an argument for some sort of disaster-sensitive Twitter censorship. That sort of thing would only serve to compound such a tragedy. Instead, this should be taken as a neurotically instructive take on the relationship between new media and the stuff so many seem to be ready to (at least) supplement it with: If you find yourself still marveling at what you believed on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, maybe you should reconsider your need for instant information.
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