Pig flu epidemic highlights best and worst of Twitter

NET RESULTS: ‘Twitterers’ are among the first with pandemic news, but accuracy is a hit and miss affair, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON 

JUST AS blogs did for 9/11, Twitter is showing that the latest social media tools significantly change the reporting of major news events.

Back in 2001, bloggers got most of the first images out to the public of the dreadful drama unfolding in the Twin Towers, well before newspapers. If you wanted information as close as possible to what was happening, blogs had it.

With the swine flu crisis, Twitter, the “microblogging” application (that is basically a vast text message, online network), outperformed blogs in the opening days, and definitely outpunched even breaking-news veterans like CNN.com. For example, I picked up that the World Health Organisation had upped its pandemic alert from a three to a four from a “tweet” on Twitter. It took 20 more minutes before the same information appeared first on CNN.

One could argue that a professional news organisation like CNN has a few more hoops to jump through than someone on Twitter, who is most likely posting something they just overheard or saw on a breaking news report.

A reporter at CNN would have had to verify the alert upgrade directly with the WHO, for example, then someone needs to write up that information in an accessible way, and then post it to the website.

By contrast, Twitter’s 140-character “tweets” can be done from a mobile handset as fast as one can text or type.

As the situation developed, a fascinating array of information on every aspect of swine flu began to pour into Twitter, from people on site in Mexico to CNN’s tweets from its reporter/medic Dr Sanjay Gupta, to the US’s Center for Disease Control (CDC), the national health organisation on the front line with health issues. Yes, the CDC has its own Twitter account(http://twitter.com/cdc emergency).

On the other hand, as is typical for Twitter, people tweeted rivers of pointless comments and sometimes incorrect information and advice. Twitterers were also accused of creating extra worry and panic because of this fug of misinformation.

And that, of course, is the enormous challenge for these new media formats where all comment is equal. Blogs can be bad enough in presenting opinion or hearsay or simply out and out untruths as fact, but Twitter, with its little quotelets, offers no space at all for context, detailed analysis or explanation.

Does that matter? Yes and no. Obviously it matters if Twitter’s fast food info\rmation out-takes are a person’s only source of information, or if one lacks the ability to process and filter information and sources (and plenty of people clearly have no room for these skills in their lives).

But for many users, the great strength of Twitter is the enforced pithiness that pressures people into offering just concentrated nuggets of information – the headline for an event, basically – and, often, links to webpages or images.

A little tweet and a link to an image can be very powerful. CNN’s Dr Gupta, in Mexico covering the growing flu epidemic, posted a tweet noting that he had a new greeting – the el-bump.

He tweeted: “With infectious diseases, I now advocate the el-bump. It’s not as cool as the fist bump, but safer. I think it will catch on.”

The link to an image taken with a mobile phone was very funny – Gupta elbow to elbow demonstrating his new “greeting”.

This sparked a number of amusing exchanges with followers of the stream of posts, and some enjoyable light-heartedness in the midst of a lot of anxiety.

I especially liked the reader who noted he’d co-invented the “Sanitary High-Five” – a back of hand to back of hand high-five gesture – but generously conceded, “The el-bump takes it a step up: this is truly groundbreaking work!”

The quickie headline nature of Twitter, coupled with the ability to add on a link to a website or an image, means users get the advantage of the short and fast comment, but also have the possibility of giving some extra context and depth, even if there’s little room for personal commentary.

When you’re looking for a quick bite of information, though, Twitter fits the bill and, as a disperser of information, it is surprisingly versatile and powerful given its inherent limitations (which, viewed another way, are also some of its strengths).

But its first big event test drive, as this flu emergency deepens, points out a challenge that lies ahead: students and citizens absolutely must be given the digital literacy skills to weigh up sources and read the flood of data coming from these evolving social media sources with a sceptical filter.

klillington@irishtimes.com

Blog and podcasts: www.techno-culture.com

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