What the Little Bird Tells Me...

With all the places I've lived in in my life, I've experienced every kind of natural diaster there is except an ice storm and I have no interest in living in a place that has them so I think I'm good.

Let me tell you a little something about earthquakes and hurricaines and tornadoes - the animals in the area always seem to know when they're coming and they do what they can to get out of the way. Humans, not so good at that. We like our homes and we think that if we stay in them when natural disasters strike, we'll be OK. They aren't. Roofs blow off and the rooms flood and sometimes you get trapped in them with no way to call for help. I remember when I was a child we lost the power, water, and phone lines for a week after Hurricane Iwa hit Oahu in Hawaii.

Looking back on that, I wonder what we would have done if we hadn't been living on a populated cul-de-sac where everyone pitched in to make it work until all the services were turned back on or if we hadn't belonged to a church that had the wisdom to relay messages to my father who was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with the US Navy.

Unlike animals, we humans have the ability to adapt and to create technology which sometimes reveals more about what's going on in a natural disaster than we ever anticipated. In a recent article, The Verge reported on how Twitter users who were live-tweeting during Hurricane Sandy managed to predict where the worst of the damage was being created by the storm. The more tweets that were localized in a specific area, the worse the storm was in the area and the greater the damage.

As horrible as it was, it's kind of cool that all of these users created an online distress signal. The more tweets, the louder the signal from a particular area.

That got me thinking. What if first responders started looking at Twitter feeds in the future as a way of knowing where to concentrate their efforts? Could they also use social media to find clusters of survivors after storms, floods or earthquakes? What about using social media to track the progression of a riot and then use the same social media to predict where pockets of the riot could be isolated and subdued? Could everyday people use Facebook or Twitter or Pintrest to find safer evacuation routes out of the path of a wildfire or tornado?

I know I'm not the scientist or emergency management official to figure this out, but I believe that we have a personal tool that hasn't fully been identified or brought to maturity when it comes to public use.

Way back in the day, one of man's earliest ancestors picked up a rock and used it to smash a bug, thus creating the first tool ever used by humans. We use Twitter and other social media mostly for entertainment. I wonder if, in a future in which we have fully realized the potential of social media, it can't be used to tell the story of what thousands of people did together to save millions of lives and not just the story of what you did last night.