I woke this morning and turned on the news, like every day, to be confronted with the horrible reality of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan. My first thought was for the safety of a very close and dear friend, Kaoru, who I met many years ago in high school. So I grabbed my Droid and checked Facebook for news. Fortunately, she and her family were safe.
My second thought was for another old friend from high school, Mo, who makes her life in the US but still has family in Japan. The news on her Facebook page was distressing. She was unable to reach her parents. A short time later though, her dad called to say that they were safe as well. Whew!
This is a perfect illustration of how social media has greatly enhanced mass communication. Instead of frantic friends and family flooding landline, cell, and email channels, three quick messages from these friends relieved the anxiety of thousands of people who care about their well-being.
Posts with the keyword, "Japan," are flooding Facebook to the tune of dozens/second today. And that's just posts that are publicly available to Everybody. I searched for, "Japan," on Twitter, and the posts are rolling so rapidly that it's impossible to read the live stream, and almost instantly, TweetDeck throttled my stream for too much traffic. All of today's top trending news on Twitter is related to this disaster.
Some people still think that social media is silly, but today's events have certainly demonstrated its power as a communications tool.
Photo credit: Smooth_O
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