I don’t subscribe to the local paper and don’t listen to local news, on cable or radio, as a morning habit. I do turn on my computer, though. Before the web, before email, I check my tweet stream. Greeting me was this tweet from Tyler:
A possible sniper on 2nd street? Anybody have details?
And thus Twitter as an emergency channel entered my lifeworld.
My first alert to a local sniper came from Twitter.
There are other channels for online information, too. Moments after Tyler’s tweet, our Informatics IT department sent an email confirming the sniper. The new Dean of the IU School of Informatics followed at 8:42a with an email saying the sniper had been contained.
Facebook has been touted as an alert system, but it is dependent on localized social networks first having access to and then disseminating critical information. Tyler changed his status (“Tyler Pace is WARNING: Sniper on 2nd and Landmark street confirmed. Area is closed down. Do not go outside or near windows if you are in the vicinity. 1h ago”) but that likely had a small zone of influence. The most active area forum, Monroe-Bloomington Talk, started a thread on the subject—including an annotated Google Map—at 8:15a. About an hour after Tyler’s tweet came a post on the BECIS blog, which is maintained by David Wild for the Bloomington Emergency Collaborative Information System. To their credit, the Herald-Times didn’t make anyone log in to their newspaper web site to get preliminary information about the situation. The web site for the Indiana Daily Student, a staple of free news in the area, has been offline all morning.
Since the Virginia Tech shootings last spring, universities have been ramping up their own emergency networks (). IU isn’t quite there yet, and I will be interested in reading if anyone in the Ivy Tech alert network received any text messages this morning. Less than a month ago, new IU president Michael McRobbie told the IDS that all campuses will have an emergency system online by the end of the year.
Bloomington has a growing awareness of how Web 2.0 can be used to create community, promote business, and share resources. With access to news still constrained by the timing of events, I think Twitter just showed it’s value as a catalyst for the spread of information … at least to those making use of the channel.