Saturday, January 16, 2010

Haiti and Twitter

By now, everyone has heard of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti near the capital on Tuesday. People believe hundreds of thousands have been killed and relief efforts are building up to bring medicine, food water and anything of need to the area. What I find most interesting, though, is that a lot of these efforts are being carried out through social media sites. When the tsunami in Asia happened in 2005, PSAs and the Red Cross asked for help and donation through the television and a few places online. Now Twitter, for instance, has several pages dedicated solely to helping Haiti. Tweets give links of where you can go online to donate money. Facebook has been utilized too, creating ads asking for help and Facebook users have been creating individual groups and threads regarding donations. One of my Facebook friends is an artist and creates her own jewlery. She decided to make special bracelets where the proceeds will go towards Haiti relief. She sent out a mass message on Facebook to tell everyone about it. These sites have also been a new platform for news distribution. People on the ground have been tweeting about what is going on and taking photos to show their followers. Major news organization such as CNN have been getting information from tweets. It's interesting to think about- a few years ago these web sites were looked at as nonsense social outlets for college kids. Now they're helping bring aid and information from one of the biggest natural disasters of all time. Without them, we might be a little more in the dark about the terrifying situation.

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