Caroline Orr BuenoI spoke to TIME magazine about the vital role that Twitter plays in crisis- and disaster-related communication — serving as a hub for firsthand witness/survivor accounts, news gathering, emergency alerts & guidance, real-time updates on closures & safe passageways, direct contact with emergency services, etc — and how catastrophic it would be to lose this, especially since we have nothing to take its place yet.
DJP (Darren John Pope)@rvawonk ... re emergency/disaster reporting etc - there is always local radio and legacy media - yes, I know, very 20th century but I actually think big social media such as Twitter suffer from an inflated sense of self importance - in reality, the world won't stop turning without Twitter et al. and journalists and citizen networks will have to go back to good old fashioned leg work (IMO)
@GreenCarnation2 well, but if the disaster is bad enough, local radio and TV studios can be affected, too. And by affected, I mean destroyed. It has happened on a number of occasions.
@rvawonk ... and yet for centuries information networks served the need and often times during the most extreme crises such as world wars. I'm the first to applaud the wonder and conveniences of social media platforms but I do think there's an element of inflated importance at play here, usually peddled by those with skin in the game. That decentralized alternatives such as Mastodon are expanding with the demise of Twitter, tells us there is always the means for localised communication.
Thornbill9@GreenCarnation2 @rvawonk for centuries? People took years to know what happened a few miles from their house never mind continents away. With so many news outlets under paywalls, local media under hedge fund austerity, cable networks filled with empty punditry, twitter was the one place where you could cut through the middleman and access true experts telling you what the corporate media didn’t want to tell you. Ancestral mastodon is obsessed with resentment of blue check status war, like Elmo