Dealing with disasters in a connected world

Facebook, which began in 2004 at Harvard University to connect students with “friends”, today claims more than 400 million “active users”, and 100 million of those access the site with mobile phones and devices. Some 70 per cent of Facebook members are outside the United States.

Twitter, launched in 2007, allows users to upload brief texts, or “tweets,” no more than 140 characters, which can be read online or passed among mobile devices of “followers” who sign up for user messages.

Twitter became a fundraising tool for the celebrity concert Hope for Haiti Now, broadcast internationally on January 22. The concert website tracked tweets on a world map - and the map still lights up every few seconds with new tweets from around the globe.

Twitter is available in six languages and 60 per cent of its registered users are outside the United States. Before January 12, the Red Cross Twitter account had been adding up to100 followers a day. During the week after, the account added at least 10,000 followers. After Chile’s February 27 quake, the fifth largest in recorded history, Twitter signups spiked 1,200 per cent, nearly all using Spanish, according to Twitter's blog.

YouTube, a website started in 2005 for sharing videos, boasts more than 1 billion views a day. Millions of hits show that users watched thousands of videos on Haiti’s disaster and recovery - and news programs relied on these as well. Not long after the Chile quake, a “Hope for Chile" video was posted, accompanied by a social-media campaign to raise relief funds.

In addition, mapping websites, such Ushahidi and Crisiscommons.org, used graphics to indicate emergency needs, and searching for people using Google, Yahoo and other search engines gave searchers immediate access to phone numbers, addresses and other details.

International telecommunications may even have saved the life of one Canadian man, who sent an SOS text from his mobile device to the Canadian Foreign Affairs Department in Ottawa, saying that he was alive, awaiting rescue beneath a collapsed building in Port-au-Prince.

Still, a closer look at social media’s role after these earthquakes suggests that gaps remain. Border-spanning power of electronic social media has not overcome human nature. Some Twitter messages from Haiti carried rumours, and the FBI issued warnings about charlatans requesting funds via Twitter messaging.

Nor have social media bridged the digital divide: Haitian internet use was low before the earthquake, and many Haitians still rely on radio and word of mouth for news.

Social media websites work best where used the most. After the Qinghai quake, Chinese names entered into Google produced little useful information. Google still struggles with nations, particularly China, over how much information should be made available online.

Although China has opened remarkably since the secretive 1970s, it continues to try and repress information that challenges emergency response.

In 2008, a 7.9-magnitude quake rocked Sichuan province, killing almost 90,000 people, including many children in collapsed schools. Critics of shoddy building practices and the post-quake government response were harassed and even jailed.

Again and again experience of recent disasters has shown the difference fast and uncensored communication makes to the survivors and relief workers. Social-media responses to natural disasters will accelerate only as long as telecommunications remain fast, cheap and uncensored.