"Twittering while California burns": Social Media and Disasters

I'm fascinated by the use of telecommunications during crises. Rafe Needleman's Webware blog has a great post on the use of Twitter during the fires in San Diego:

Disasters are social: They affect large groups of people, all thrown together by circumstance or location. So when I was at a dinner with Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale two weeks ago and he said, "The next disaster will be Twittered," I thought he was spot on. What better use could there be for a social media site like Twitter than to support people with a dire need to connect to each other and share information? (Full story: Twittering while California burns)

During Katrina, there were all kinds of fascinating uses of new telecom tools - probably the most interesting was the real-time transcription of Louisana State Police scanner traffic by an ad hoc group of IRC chatters (someone had patched their scanner over to an Internet audio stream).

Telecommuting in the US was born after the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge earthquakes. I'm sure we'll see lots of bottom-up ad hoc innovation during this disaster as well.

Here are some of my old papers - Telecommunications Infrastructure in Disasters: Preparing Cities for Crisis Communications and Disaster Forensics: Leveraging Crisis Information Systems for Social Science and a video of a talk I did with Bill Mitchell at MIT on "Trauma and Rebuilding in the Digital Electronic Era".

Comments

[ricky]

Disaster affected large groups of peoples, historical monument and much more, all thrown together by circumstance or location. Therefore, when I was at a dinner with my friend Harry two weeks ago and he said, the next disaster will be twittered.
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Ricky

http://www.treatmentcenters.org/california