mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

Chino Hills quake

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of social networks and microblogging/nanoblogging, but I’m not really ready to buy into the hype about the obliteration of traditional media.

The in May was ballyhooed as a triumph of Twitter over traditional media, and in fact there was a significant time delay before stories from traditional channels finally hit. But this is more a commentary on the limitations of the press in a repressive Communist regime that has a stranglehold on information, not to mention a fact that the epicenter was in a relatively remote rural region almost 100 miles away from Chengdu.Chengdu/Sichuan quake

The case is significantly different when you’re dealing with a major metropolitan area in an industrialized country under a regime that allows relative freedom of the press. The local news happened to be on-the-air when the Chino Hills quake hit. They got in touch with Cal Tech seismologists relatively rapidly. In contrast, the first reports on Twitter localized it wrong (San Diego is over 100 miles away from the epicenter) and most of the chatter was simply reiterating what the local news was reporting.


Not to say that Twitter didn’t have any value. Certainly, since the cell phone network got overwhelmed by panicked callers and since land line service was disrupted by the quake, the only avenues of communication remaining were SMS and the Internet (thank you, ARPAnet!) But it’s really more of an adjunct than a replacement to traditional media, and there’s a lot of noise and misinformation.

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