Twitter moved from prankish to practical as storm hit
The sharing aspect of social media made it feel like everyone was in the same boat
NEW YORK — Twitter is often a cauldron of sarcasm, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can change during large events — users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a realtime service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.
As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under normal circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity scene.
And then along came hurricane Sandy. People on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.
It is hard to data-mine the torrent (some estimates suggested there were 3.5 million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy), but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via email.
“I kept a close eye on the Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related — New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”
At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a handcranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Twitter posts on my smartphone.
Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and retweet, you feel as if you are adding something.
The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different from consuming mass media. Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media — amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation — was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don’t feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.
In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night of the storm and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web.
There were abundant news posts from antderosa of Reuters, acarvin of NPR and brianstelter of the New York Times, among many others, but there were also tweets from ordinary people relaying very important information about their blocks, their neighbourhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as the District of Columbia and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.