Catshanghai

Yesterday we were celebrating the virtues of Twitter as a news flash tool for natural disasters.

The subsequent revelation that tens of thousands of people have died is making some of us uneasy that our self congratulatory tweets and blog posts were somewhat inappropriate.

Kaiser Kuo of Digital Watch wrote a very thoughtful, but ambivalent post about the role of Twitter in spreading news about the earthquake in Sichuan. On one hand, he recognises the value of Twitter as an effective communication tool that bridged the gap between the Chinese and English speaking world when he notes:

The other dimension to Twitter that proved very useful in this case was its global usership: there were lots of Chinese messages I was following, and I was among many people bilingual individuals translating more useful, insightful, or interesting tweets from Chinese into English. Call it “bridge microblogging.”
The Sichuan Quake and the Hubris of Twitter Users

However, he also argues that IM and other forms of media were also getting the message out of Sichuan when he writes:

On balance, though, I feel there’s something fundamentally unsettling that attention within the Twitter community should have shifted at all off the matter at hand and on to a celebration of the particular communication tool we were using. There’s no doubt that it was useful, but by no means did this episode drive a nail in the coffin of traditional media, which by my lights has been exceptionally good in its reporting — Xinhua, Phoenix, CCTV, and many other Chinese news organizations have really taken full advantage of the candor Beijing seems to be allowing and encouraging.

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Tags: Twitter, China, Sichuan, earthquake