Musings

After reading this CNN article about the Twitter hype surrounding the swine flu outbreak (and after getting the urge to blog now that I’m finally back on co-op), I had to throw my 2 cents on the interwebs.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting quite into Twitter and have been fascinated by the myriad uses people have found for it — everything from run-of-the-mill ambient intimacy to improving customer service, monitoring unborn babies to getting a student out of an Egyptian prision. Especially since the recent full implementation of search and trending topics in the web interface sidebar, one of Twitter’s most fascinating uses is in its application during crisis.

The impact Twitter is having on traditional media sources (who were already struggling to cope with the social media revolution) is probably more helpful than harmful in my opinion. Twitter provides a real-time channel for quick updates that is more suited to breaking news than most other digital channels.

Now, media sources must be cautious in utilizing this always-on form of communication. It’s fairly easy to overwhelm followers with tweets, and if that happens the information loses salience and perceived value, more than likely resulting in lost followers. Many news sources that I follow have found a happy medium by segmenting news by topic, etc. (Ex: I follow CNN’s @politicalticker for political updates since CNN’s breaking news is too much; on the other hand, I follow @cbs3 for local breaking news since they do a good job of posting only a few stories per day).

But back to the article that spurred this post — the prevailing attitude seems to be that Twitter is doing more harm than good in this situation as the RumorMill 2.0 cultivates mass panic. Dangerous? Perhaps. But I’d rather everyone be talking and looking for information about an epidemic than sitting idly by.

Sure, Twitter provides an easy means for fostering hysteria; sure, people can post whatever they feel like and it may or may not be reliable. But that’s not very different than good ol’ fashioned word of mouth…If anything, I should hope Twitter has a positive effect since people can only say 140 characters, and likely have to provide more details with a link to a reliable source. And, since the pace is so quick, I think it’s more likely that people will run into reliable information before they are too convinced by unreliable information.

Though in the end, it all comes down to taking information with a grain of salt. If I’ve learned anything in my ~16 years of schooling (and the past 1.5 years working at a newspaper) it’s that you should always evaluate information based on the authority and credibility of the source, and when one source is unverifiable, cross-check with others. It’s really not hard, people. Just because you see a couple tweets saying “DON’T EAT PORK YOU’LL GET SWINE FLU!!1!one!” doesn’t mean you should toss out all your bacon — it means you should find more detailed, authoritative information. More than likely this will be easy, since hopefully you follow some level-headed Twitterer who linked to a news article or a government source.

I first heard about Swine Flu when I saw it trending on Twitter. And frankly, I ignored it the first few times I saw it until someone I know tweeting about it. Then I looked around a bit more, coming across the swine flu Google map (which let me quickly determine there were no outbreaks reported so far in Philadelphia) and @CDCemergency – now that’s a great, appropriate use of Twitter. When it comes to these pandemic rumors, I tend to avoid even the major news networks because they tend to inject far too much hype with their dramatic graphics and updates every 10 minutes saying pretty much the same things over and over again. All I want is information from the people who know what they’re talking about — in this case, the CDC. Hopefully I’m not a minority in that desire.

Top ranked on Digg: How Swine Flu Spreads from Pigs to Humans

Another thing I’m finding interesting about this situation is the mass of tweets joking about swine flu — one of humanity’s best defense mechanisms is humor. Really, there’s little most of us can do to change the outcome of the outbreak, other than being conscious of our own heath and those around us. So in the meantime, the interwebs might as well turn it into a meme, like everything else dark and scary in this modern world.

I’m also left wondering how many comedic tweets CNN and whonot interpretted as serious — they have a tendency to miss out on the ‘Net Gen’s sense of humor.

See also: today’s xkcd :)