Mumbai: flash mob or social media in action?

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When news of the ‘terrorist outrage’ broke yesterday evening several people mailed and messaged me with links to the coverage on Twitter. I was awestruck by the live feeds provided at #Mumbai and others (such as Twitter Grid). Having looked around elsewhere, my initial reaction was that the main old-school news agencies like Reuters, CNN and the BBC just weren’t providing the coverage, in contrast to the truly MASSIVE volume of tweeting going on. But as the evening continued my feelings changed about this, and I started to see and ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets. During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000.

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The facts are still unknown, but it was clear that ‘citizen media’ filled the vacuum provided by official news agencies (here again, there were rumours doing the rounds that because of Thanksgiving, most of the official media had gone on holiday - leaving caretaker managers in place. It was suggested at one stage that CNN was being run by the IT team…). So much noise. So little signal. Even if the truest signal was actually coming through Twitter it was so drowned in rumour, personal utterance, revenge and irrelvance as to be incomprehensible. In the flattened world of the Social Web there is clearly no filter on decency or taste. That made tweets like these possible:

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One of the most unpleasant things to witness was the general ‘whoop whoop’ the more self-regarding voices of the social mediasphere were giving themselves. For some, it seemed like the social media coverage of the event became the story. The real event for quite a number of people last night was: Twitter 1, CNN 0 - which is utterly sad. Old media became the enemies for many, not the terrorists.

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If traditional media agencies behaved like this (openly) they’d find themselves in trouble - but no-one regulates the mob and it answers to no-one.

Then this morning I see the word go round that the terrorists themselves might be using Twitter to find out what the security forces were up to. A hush went round:

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Which, once again, brought out the worst in many:

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There were no doubt many well-meaning people Twittering. Some on the ground were no doubt using the service to share their personal horror and to connect with the outside world must have been a comfort. But very few were on the ground. Most participants were far away. There needs to be some way of working out who in a situation like this has more authority than someone else. Of course, simply being there isn’t necessarily an indication of authority, but it does provide some context. I’d be interested to know if Twitter helped anyone last night to get hold of the right blood.

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Many were simply expressing their horror - that’s fine. But do we want this to be ‘mixed up’ with news. Is it helpful or sensible to mash news up with personal reflections? How do we know what’s true any more when everyone’s voice has the same weight?

Last night scared me. We’re like kids playing with things that we still don’t understand. A human tragedy became “something to follow”.

I did find some interesting links were being posted - to journalist Vinu’s photostream, and I thought that NowPublic provided sensible, coherent coverage from a crowd-sourced base. Mainstream media appears to be using the social stuff to create its own coverage - CNN gave Twitter credit last night, and The NYTimes are actively asking for contributions.

The most touching eyewitness account I found came from a blog called ‘A Night Out In Mumbai’, and tells the story of frightened people helping each other in an hour of need. Definitely worth a read - although be careful as it contains more than 140 characters.