(Sorry in advance if my English sounds weird… )
In Mark Andrejevic’s interview, he describes how interactivity of information in current society actually excludes what we can know by having limited access to resources that are controlled by information providers such as certain websites and broadcasting. Particularly, he mentions how TV news programs have been narrowing down information which results in drawing viewers.
While reading this article, what popped in my head was the impact that social media made while Japan went through 3.11 Earthquake last year. I think it is interesting because many Japanese people accessed to Twitter to get information that broadcasting on television did not show or make official to viewers. In other words, Twitter played a role as a place where people went looking for more liberal, rather blunt but accurate information, which is contrary to what Mark Andrejevic says social media does.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214213/Twitter_Facebook_become_lifelines_after_Japan_quake
http://idisaster.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/social-media-and-the-japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-what-we-can-learn/
I was in Japan when the disaster happened, and while I had not been an active Twitter user, I was constantly checking my Twitter account for updated information about whether my friends are all safe, and accuracy of announcements by the government on nuclear power plant explosions. While NHK channel (similar to ABC in the US) showed official government announcements, on Twitter, where there was a record made that people tweeted 1200 times per minute, so much discussion was going on regarding whether information we saw on TV was describing precisely what was happening in Northern Japan. Twitter was more accessible for people from cell phones under a situation in which there was no enough connection or access to computers or televisions.
Also personally Twitter was useful in a way that many people were tweeting about traffic information, as I was stuck in a shopping mall over night after all trains stopped running. In addition, a number of victims who got to get access to Twitter from their phones, tweeted begging for helps of food, clothes and asked as many people as possible to spread these tweets. This resulted in a great impact that huge amount of resources was sent to the damaged area from everywhere in Japan within just a few days. In a more broader sense, many celebrities tweeted about the disaster in Japan, Lady Gaga , Katy Perry to name a few, and this caused a lot of people throughout the world donate millions of dollars for Japan.
Even though it is true that Twitter did help people in terms of finding some people who were missing or appealing to the society what victims really needed for help, we cannot deny that it also created a lot of confusion. Because there is no such a function on Twitter that stops people from posting ambiguous or wrong information, many false tweets were spread among people. In fact, I still remember one of my friends called me saying “farewell” before we all would die because she believed in a tweet that said the whole Eastern Japan was going to fall apart within a few days due to the explosion of nuclear plants. I found this ironic since people were getting false information from Twitter as a result of seeking for accurate and hidden resources that TV did not say.
Right now, as Japan has been working for recovery from the disaster (and yes, this is going to take years to come till finish) there is an IT team that is working on screening Twitter in order to prevent false information from being spread. But wouldn’t this change the role of Twitter then, if people wanted information going among people freely without being censored? After all, isn’t it impossible for us to achieve both getting correct sources freely and being controlled by social media on what we can access to??
I really liked your post on the various ways that a social medium, like Twitter, can be used and misused, especially in times of crisis. The end of your post mentioned how the Japanese government might start trying to screen Twitter to ensure that only accurate information is being circulated, but you are right in saying that this type of censorship is what social media rebels against fundamentally. This reminds me of how YouTube has started censoring videos on its site for unlawful use of copyright images or audio; but how is making a video montage of borrowed clips of song/film any different from making a literal collage out of magazine cutouts? As social media becomes more popular it inevitably has to become more institutionalized, and therefore, regulated. I think initially, when a social medium is new, it is very much ‘of the people, for the people’, but once it gains enough popularity and social relevance, Andrejevic is right in saying that the potential for democratization in interactivity fails to actualize. It is almost impossible to have a major democratic social force, like Twitter, run unchecked in society for too long.
I love the first person experience that you brought to this post, it makes it much more interesting to hear how what we’re learning personally affected you. It seems that new technology for interactivity, like TiVo in the article and now social interaction sites like Twitter, is continuously evolving because it is constantly outrunning regulation. Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that governments will try to regulate Twitter when more people are relying on it for information that on their approved news outlets. Such sites seem to get their success from actions before governments catch on and try to use them in their favor. Interactive technology must then in turn find a new platform for its uncensored discourse of ideas.
In one of my other classes we are talking about the market v. the public sphere model which address this very controversy between the media and the public good. In many cases, like that forementioned, the media mogels show the world a very specific, bias, look at the events not paying any mind to the information that people need, or want to see. Rather, the market model, and most media mogels, focus on the economic side of things comparing the exchange of ideas to the exchange of tagible goods in a free market society. Having said this, I find it very interesting the ways in which people find a way to gain access to the information they want to hear and read even if it has to be 240 characters or less. It seems very unfortunate that as soon as the public sphere is finding its way into popular culture the people’s voices are being taken away from them.
This was a really interesting post all-around. I love how you incorporated personal experience. To be honest, when we talk about uncensored social media, I never really consider how it might actually be more helpful than detrimental. There is always that prejudice, especially when it comes to online blogging/dating/profiles, that there are extreme amounts of potential danger. Kids interact with child molesters, people are bullied beyond belief, rumors are spread, etc. You never really hear the potential benefits of something like that. The fact that you witnessed it first hand make it even more interesting. As I was reading, it reminded me of things like the Amber Alert and other methods of tracking down lost/kidnapped children and things like that. When you can send out information at the press of a button and be guaranteed that large amounts of people will see it, it can really make a difference when it comes to potential disasters and life threatening events like an earthquake. Unfortunately, I think things like that will always end up being abused by one person or another. Monitoring tweets doesn’t sound like it would be plausible or effective. For example, how would someone know if Mary was “stuck in the basement, trapped by a broken door, with no food or drink?” They wouldn’t. It’s not like the people working for Wikipedia that can do research using thousands of years of published information and knowledge. Personal experiences like that have no way of being verified. Like you said, that is one of the dangers of things like Twitter and can even be tied into the things I mentioned earlier like bullying, rumors, etc. People are always going to post things like that, but we cannot overlook the potential benefits of instant communication and information access during disasters like the earthquake in Japan.
Reading the section of this post about the friend who called to say goodbye gave me chills. Although I have not really experienced anything of this magnitude, it does make me appreciate the technologically advanced world that we live in today. If Twitter or another social media sites had not been invented at the time of the earthquake, then I’m sure a lot of people would have been even more confused and disoriented and scared than they already were. Twitter became a way for people to know that their loved ones were safe. Even though that the flow of falso information could end up being dangerous, I do believe that social media was extremely beneficial in the case of the Japanese earthquake.