Social Media Week, Day One: “Post Traumatic Twitter”
To kick off Social Media Week in New York City, we hit up a cool loft space under the Brooklyn Bridge to discuss the future of APIs and cloud computing. Admittedly, this was the session I was least looking forward to, so I was glad we got it over with early in the week.
As you can imagine, the discussion was rather techie, but Sam of drop.io did have an interesting metaphor to describe where things are headed with APIs. He likened it to the financial crisis, where developers are repacking existing APIs over and over again. If the underlying foundation gets hit, the rest of the system will crash. Attendees also remarked how APIs can be one-sided relationships. Facebook can release an API, and the community is free to tap into it, but Facebook owes nothing to those developers. It’s risky then for any start-up to be wholly dependent on such APIs. Some say history repeats itself. Could it be that we’ll see another dot com crash? Food for thought…
Our second session explored the use of social media in the Haiti disaster aftermath. Held at the gorgeous New York Times building, Personal Democracy Forum founder Andrew Rasiej moderated a discussion that was mostly dominated by NBC news anchor Ann Curry, but also included NYT staff writer Rob Mackay, Jason Crone of Doctors Without Borders, and Erik Parker, a freelance journalist who was in Haiti when the quake struck and shot video on his iPhone two minutes after the quake.
The discussion mainly focussed on the role of Twitter in reporter disasters, particularly from a reporter’s perspective. Ann Curry was on the ground in Haiti three days after the quake, but she had found her first primary source via a direct message on Twitter. Once in Haiti she would use Twitter to report on the recovery effort, going as far as tweeting to the US Air Force, which was handling air traffic, to let the Doctors Without Borders plane land, since they needed the supplies.
For Jason, these events changed the way Doctors Without Borders looks at social media. It has evolved beyond a communications tool to a full-blown mobilization tool. Interactions with Ann Curry on Twitter allowed DWB to overcome obstacles at the airport. Rather than use press releases, they used Twitter to get important, timely updates out to the world.
As Erik Parker pointed out, Twitter is now infrastructure that reporters rely on for emergency communications. In his case, news outlets didn’t want him to file stories. It would take too long, and with electricity in short demand, there was no guarantee his stories would ever make it. He was told to tweet instead. While other reporters were having severe challenges filing their stories the old fashion way, he was able to file.
Ann Curry admitted that the power of Twitter is misunderstood among some of her colleagues. She did have two observations of Twitter that I found interesting:
The first is that the Twitter community has a real wish to serve, shown by people’s retweeting behaviour. I’ve noticed this too, and suspect it has something to do with how easy it is for people to do. Click a button in your favourite Twitter client; add your own words if you like and bingo, you’re done, and you feel like you did something worthwhile. It’s slacktivism 101.
The second observation she had that I found interesting was her reference to a possible new trauma, “Post Traumatic Twitter Syndrome.” People are sharing images and videos of disasters that news editors would never think to publish or air on television. Yet in the unmoderated waters of Twitter, anything goes. She wonders what kind of long-term effect this may have.
Photo Credit: Jaci Berkopec