Yesterday afternoon in New York, and other cities across the Eastern seaboard, fierce thunderstorms hit. No major damage, not even widespread power outages, and yet the social media storm that accompanied the real ones leaned toward frenzied. I got caught up in it, too--live-tweeting the relatively mild conditions we experienced in south Brooklyn, and wondering about the emergency push alert I'd received for the first time on my mobile phone. Pictures of hail and scary looking clouds flew by, while many took the end-times feeling of the cloudburst to preach about the dangers of climate change. And then it was all over an hour later.
This summer's early heat wave has felt like an anomaly, and certainly I've never seen pictures of storms around NYC like those that were shared over the course of the storm. And I'm wondering if that's exactly the point: I can't compare those pictures to pictures I remember as a kid, because I didn't have Twitter when I was ten. As we are now living these shared events in real time via social technologies, those technologies are perhaps shifting deeply our understanding of the events, as well as our understanding of their context, while they're still happening.
When surprising or alarming events have happened in the past, pre-social networks, how have we processed them socially? If we were in a house or office with other people, we'd have talked about it with them, and discussed later with others. We'd go to TV news, local papers, or pre-socnet Internet sites to learn about how the storm affected people in our area. That information would have been curated and edited by a small number of people and packaged for consumption.
Of course that meant that we only received a limited set of perspectives on what transpired. One of the things I love most about what social technologies do is provide us with the tools to contribute perspectives that have been missing from public conversations. In the past, the limited nature of authoritative news sharing kept many peoples' experiences and values out of the discourse, and skewed information distribution to benefit those with whom the news identifiers socially identified. Have a look at how women's suffrage and civil rights struggles were often portrayed, and you'll see what I mean. Social networks can change all that by opening up access to many different kinds of people.
On the downside of all this participation, of course, there are the mob scene moments. Facts get misconstrued or falsified altogether, incorrect attributions are made, misinformation is spread. I wrote about the evolution of misinformation in my book:
Before the Internet, we assessed the authority of our peers and relied on them to share trustworthy information, with some degree of success (and failure--I grew up thinking I'd die if I simultaneously ate Pop Rocks and drank a Coke). The Internet hits the scene, and suddenly there's an explosion of urban legends. Remember those e-mail chains where a little boy with cancer only wished to see his e-mail forwarded around?
Urban legends and hoaxes make emotional appeals that force us to address our common cultural fears (death, terror, freaky candy that pops in your mouth). If we trust the information source (often a friend or family member), we usually believe the information is true--we transfer a person's general trustworthiness to individual bits of news without verifying whether the information is correct. But if someone repeatedly shares enough false information, we naturally respond by lowering the authority that person has in the news-sharing department. Quick survey: How many people don't read e-mails from Aunt Beatrice anymore because she sent the human organ theft hoax again?
We're at roughly the same level with social networks right now as we were with e-mail in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The tools are new and snazzy, and we don't yet have a sophisticated understanding of the role they play in our lives.
Outside of what happens externally in the moment with information spread, I'm also interested in exploring what happens internally in our brains as our perceptions are shaped by an overload of new information, some bits true, some not. I can't remember seeing freaky storm clouds when I was a kid in upstate New York, but memory is notoriously flawed, to put it mildly. So, as these storms pass through, are they really the anomalies we feel like they are when we see friends sharing hail and flood reports? Or is the overload of social network information reshaping our perceptive consciousness in real time?
