Promises, Promises…
Have you broken your New Year’s resolution yet?
This is me trying to live up to mine. Just trying to put my best foot forward and resume writing whenever possible – or when a topic really sparks curiosity or outrage.
Still, what may happen is this someone will be singing the chorus of this to me shortly…
How about you? Did you make resolutions? Will you keep them?
Hiatus
It’s summer and I have a small child to chase hither and thither.
As such, there will be no new posts before Autumn.
But please do come back and check in when the calendar turns to September.
Be well & happy.
Social Media And Its Role In The Panic-demic
As former member of the fourth estate, I feel quite elegiac about the sound of the presses slowing towards an inevitable stop. Ever since I saw His Girl Friday as a very small child, I wanted to be a reporter. [And who wouldn’t – Roz Russell was gorgeous, bantered beautifully with even more beautiful Cary Grant and got to do good through the power of the word!]
Today, however, I find myself in the surprising and uncomfortable position of being more than a little miffed at my paper- and broadcast-based journalistic brethren. Their eagerness to point the finger at social media as panic-mongers of DOOM as the Swine Flu crisis develops.
REACTIONARY REACTIONS?
An example of the digi-pointing can be found in a blog by Milo Yiannopolous of the UK’s Telegraph who notes:
And closer to home, the usually level-headed and excellent news source NPR has also chimed in, with Evgeny Morozov noting that
You’ll forgive me if I state that this sounds a bit like sour grapes. True, one of the justifiable concerns about social media is that there is a dearth of fact-checking. And yes, there are idiots out there who will play the Web 2.0 version of the game of telephone, terror edition. But has there never been a panic caused by a broadcast network or a newspaper? Truly? Rumours never have flown because of a hyperbolic headline or an over-emphatic piece on a 24 hour news network?
ANOTHER LOOK AT SOCIAL MEDIA IN RELATION TO SWINE FLU
No one is downplaying the fact that this is a potentially deadly illness and that people have been tested positive for it on several continents. The threat is real and frightening.
However, it is also true that almost nobody has looked at the positive ways social media has been used in the course of this porcine pandemic.
Just to offer a few examples:
The Centre for Disease Control has been offering updates on Twitter such as
And over on FriendFeed, one of its users has created a Swine Flu room which aggregates “various real-time information streams on swine flu from across the web,” making it a reliable and timely source of information.
The CDC has also used YouTube to present a video by Dr. Joe Bresee of its Influenza Division dealing with the signs, symptoms, transmission and treatment of Swine Flu.
So, in fact, social media has been a means for calming the public and providing it with a stream of accurate and useful information – which is not a story you are likely to see in your local paper, if in fact you still have one.