When earthquakes and tsunami’s hit –back away from your tv and turn to social media. You’ll get real live people with stories about hope, success, challenges and yes, deaths and tragies. You’ll get a better understanding of the big picture and not just the blood and tears that TV is apt to toss our way.
Blogs and microblogging (like Twitter) are close to the action and the true heart of the matter. In Hey From Japan, we learn about the earthquake and the preparations that surrounded it. Is my family ok? Do the phones work? Is my house safe to go into? The unfolding story is news. True news.
Sadly, TV dwells on the blood, guts and gore which tends to disconnect us from the living and breathing people and their stories on the other end.
TimeOutTokoyo has regular updates about blackout times, hospitals, radiation levels, evacuation radius, transportation and train schedules, and other concerns that remind us of the chaos they are living through.
This headline by Dave Ewing was found in a Tweet but not in a newspaper “Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes. “ Mainstream media wants to talk about death tolls and injuires. Too bad for us!
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Happily ... after retirement 
Yes, and not only that … it’s also updated much faster. The day before yesterday, I read a tweet about that awful bus crash in the Bronx that killed fourteen people so far. Wanted to read more about it, so I headed over to CNN, but they had NOTHING about it! It often happens like that… perhaps if I’d turned on the TV, it had been there, I don’t know.
I’ve had a Twitter-account since the get-go. Takes a little getting used to, when you’re new to it … in the beginning many people thought it was some type of chat line.
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It’s like when phones were just installed and everything was routed through the operator. And then when many families shared one line– here we called it a party line. Nothing was private on a party line and information spread like wildfire. Twitter has that effect – passing along information that happens in the moment. I found this great link about Early Telephone Operators...
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Hey- thanks for the tip! Time Out Japan has some great information and you are SPOT ON.
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You’re welcome! The tweets out there have links to breaking news moment-to-moment. We are the news!
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