In Case of Emergency – Check Twitter
Following on a previous blog topic – the use of social media for healthcare, the following article speaks about using social media tools to “enhance disaster preparedness and emergency response”.
I found the article thought provoking but had difficulty articulating my ideas so I shared the link with a fellow ONIG member and was totally impressed by the immediate response I received back. I quote:
“Thanks for the link. The sad fact is that I typically turn to twitter to search out current events now, even before I check online news or the tv. If something is breaking, twitter will tell me about it. I can't even recall all the 'things' (e.g., Ontario earthquake, G20 riots, Vancouver riots, Michael Jackson's death, Norway shootings, etc) over the last two years that I have been notified about via twitter.....this article highlights this in a more solidified fashion.
…if you wanted to write this up, you could take a few angles:
Public awareness of mass convergence events/situations (e.g., Vancouver riots as a recent Canadian example) can spread instantaneously through social media. Healthcare information can to, but no centralized organization has really figured out how to effectively leverage this sort of medium (probably because social media runs on the premise of decentralization). Since twitter/facebook are decentralized, getting information to where it is needed is a 'group/crowd' process, rather than a hierarchical message. The implications of this leveling of where information comes from are significant. Since information no longer 'comes' from a hierarchical source (e.g., the police and government telling people what to do), rather, it is sometimes generated and spread by normal individuals in the 'crowd' - how we respond, track and follow emergency/pandemic situations is radically different than 5....10 years ago. We no longer wait for the 'official' line from authoritative sources (e.g., newspapers, governments, police)...... the crowd interprets, analyses, and determines what is important and what is shared. This typically occurs in conjunction with traditional sources of info (e.g., news papers, police, government), but not always. In a health context, the implications are huge. During the next upcoming pandemic, where will information come from? How will information spread? Will it come from an accredited source....or, sources closer to the action reporting on what they 'think' is occurring? The implications are scary and interesting all in the same right.”
How could I add to this commentary! I wasn’t even aware of all this depth prior to my little musings.
What I found interesting, was the immediate distillation and crystallization of themes surrounding twitter and how those processes actually modeled the same format as Tweets. Maybe that is the power of Twitter – the Twitterlings mimic our own little thought-snippets and thus snap readily into our own uptake receptors. But just as easily, the next Tweet updates and replaces the previous information, correcting misinformation as more people respond to the original Tweets in real time, like a form of twittering homeostasis.
In an emergency – we need the latest information and we need to process it rapidly. Twitter, with its almost synaptic ability to transmit information, meets these needs.
^IJ
