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Throughout the past couple of years, the online social networking service known as Twitter has both performed as a notification tool and a perplexing instrument for data gathering and information retrieval. According to many authors and researchers who observed the devastating earthquake in Japan, Twitter emerged as the service that was used to both communicate messages outside the country and to gather news updates about the remaining state of Japan. Twitter had a drastic jump in traffic as users tried to get news updates, contact friends and family, and update the rest of the world on the situation from the perspective of a remote sensor.
I agree that Twitter emerged as a huge service during the disaster as a means of communication, but I have concerns relating to how the information from the disaster was actually utilized to make decisions and to send out evacuation orders, or to coordinate with emergency aid workers. Much like we discovered with the Ushahidi platform, gathering information and data looks like a great idea, but did anyone actually use this information? Japan may be viewed as a technologically advanced society, but I feel they still mainly depended on phone lines, cell phone towers, and satellite links for communication.
I have heard of numerous efforts by professors and other researchers outside academia who appreciate the complexity behind interpreting thousands of tweets and digital traffic. Project EMERSE here at Penn State offered methods involved with automated processing of Twitter data for the purposes of organizing traffic based on a combination of topologies and sorting ontologies. Other professors and associates of the College have indicated using Twitter data to create sound. Such sounds would indicate normal activity versus spikes in activity when new trends become popular in a short amount of time. Both such experiments and processes are intriguing to me as first steps in the right direction to turn scattered and unorganized Twitter traffic into actionable information for emergency aid workers and large-scale decision makers.
Speaking of tools that can be used in a wide variety of ways, one article I came across in my weekly feeds included an article about how Twitter traffic can be sorted and analyzed to determine threats for government agencies and defense watchdogs. This article, produced by the Associated Press, indicates the US Defense industry became very concerned with the types of traffic that traveled out of the "Arab Spring." Understandably, most officers in law enforcement haven't received any kind of training to handle threats made on social networking sites, let alone understand how to identify subtle threats in language usage. Confidence and reliability of the information just might be a problem to encounter, but actionable information can possibly be translated into actionable intelligence for their purposes.
Millions of people use Twitter, but for all the people who tweet or use tweets to communicate and receive information, information has yet to be created on a level to assemble action on behalf of leaders and decision makers. Potential exists, but wide-spread usage is hard to come by.
Hey Tony! (For some reason I just had a flashback to Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes singing in their commercials. Odd.) I absolutely agree with you that Twitter may not be the ideal communication tool people use when disasters need various responses including health care, medical attention, rehabilitation of the city/cities affected, etc. While during the Hatian earthquake disaster, twitter via Ushahidi and the short code 4636 was deemed an appropriate tool to help responders on the ground get a mapped view of where people were, what was most tweeted, etc. these can often be taken advantage of. Like Dr. Tapia said in one of our first few classes... if one person tweets "theres someone under the rubble #place-where-they-are" and help arrives, and they tell another person who tells another person who tells another person, who MAY hear someone else trapped under the rubble just like everyone else, where is the line drawn to help those who have tweeted, or not to help?
ReplyDeleteI am a little shocked to hear that the US government does not have adequate methods for “monitoring domestic social networking activity.” However, it sounds like that is more the result of policy issues rather than technological issues. It think it is very important that “strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens and protect privacy” are being discussed. I do not imagine that it would be very difficult for the government to monitor anything they wanted on a social network site like Twitter. Once the details get straightened out, I wonder if these new means of communication, like Twitter, will actually prove challenging to monitor.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to hear that the Humanitarian Community is not the only ones having trouble dealing with these new means of communication. As social network monitoring is incorporated into various systems, I think that most problems will arise from issues dealing with privacy. If something is posted or uploaded to the Internet, a person who is very persistent will eventually gain access to it. This inherent “issue” comes as a result of networks, which are of vital importance, but also particularly problematic. It will be interesting to see how information from social media sites are dealt with.