Boxing Day Tsunami 2004
On the 26th of December in 2004, Sri Lanka, along with other countries in the region, was devastated by a Tsunami that originated from Indonesia. Due to poor warning systems and inadequate communications infrastructure, most people were taken by surprise by the natural disaster. In Sri Lanka alone, there were 35,000 deaths and nearly half a million people were internally displaced. A hypothetical but valid question would be – What if social media existed in Sri Lanka at the time? What effect could it have had before, during and after the tsunami?
Social media networking websites often serve as prime methods of reporting new information. The spreading of information is fuelled by the millions of users that visit these websites, as well as, the ability of users to easily communicate information to large masses of people in different components of the extensive human social network. An interesting but logical finding, according to a study published by the Indian Institute of Technology1, states that even though news about disasters may start from multiple places in the social network, the news quickly finds a core niche in the network where an online community are interested in the disaster, and the news is unlikely to escape from this community. Furthermore, with the ability, on Twitter, to use hash tags to categorize events and places, lots of information can be learned online about a natural disaster.
Thus, if social media existed in Sri Lanka at the time, people would have had access to the websites such as Facebook and Twitter, and thousands of civilians would have been notified of the imminent tsunami. This results in a form of physical ‘Information Cascade’ –people on the coast would have begun to evacuate, and neighbors would have made the same decisions. Also, with the ability to upload and share pictures on these networking sites, people could have been informed of events through real time updates, and therefore travel routes could have been changed accordingly. This would have saved thousands of lives, as well as resulted in fewer internally displaced people. Social media would have also been able to direct first responders and volunteers to sites of heavy damage.
Despite the many news articles these days about the negative aspects of social media, I believe, social media is a blessing in disguise. If social media existed amongst users in Sri Lanka, many lives could have been saved and many children would have not been displaced from their mothers.
http://www2012.wwwconference.org/proceedings/companion/p671.pdf
-RUSTY