Local Crises, Global Emergencies, and Networked Civil Society

by Emily Gertz

Published November 27, 2008 @ 12:14PM PT

Within minutes of the beginning of yesterday's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, or so it seemed, a group of prominent Indian bloggers and social media experts set up the Mumbai Help blog. From this central online location, they've been doing their best to relay accurate news about what's happening in the city and requests for help -- such as blood drives at Mumbai hospitals.

It's a breathtaking example of how online networks can magnify the efforts civil society to provide mutual aid during an emergency. It's also not surprising. Many of the Mumbai Help bloggers are veterans of SEA EAT: the South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami blog, wiki and database; efforts that gained worldwide prominence for their useful efforts at the time of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on December 26, 2004.

That group (which eventually recast itself as The World Wide Help Group to aid other relief efforts) clearly banked lessons learned during the earthquake-tsunami disaster. So they were ready to mobilize themselves right on the heels of the attacks in Mumbai.

No messing around trying to find sympathetic webmaster to host the blog, for instance, or time wasted managing blog software. The Mumbai Help team simply put up the site on the free hosted service Blogger.

(I can personally vouch that many hours of tech effort are conserved by going with this kind of out-of-the-box service, no doubt to be better used in a crisis. And the stripped down, graphics-free design should allow people in a situation with bad or spotty internet access to have a better chance of connecting to the site.)

I've got some thoughts about how this might relate to stopping global warming. They're still pretty raw, so I need to make my way through some events of the past 24 hours to work up to them, at the end of this post.

Twittered updates about events in Mumbai (search on #mumbai to create a feed)have beaten every American news outlet to the punch, as far as I can tell to this moment. They've also given people all around the world opportunities to do more than stare impotently at the horrible pictures on the TV screen, by crowdsourcing assistance on time-consuming but vital tasks.

When Mumbai Help blogger (and fellow former Worldchanger) Dina Mehta tweeted for help transcribing five pages of the names of the dead and injured and their locations, she was immediately answered by people all over the world. In short order, they created this searchable spreadsheet of names, which would have taken one person hours of tedious effort.

The participatory journalism front is fully engaged as well, including but not limited to:

• The images Vinu Ranganathan put on flickr of one of the attacks, near his home, seemed for hours to be the only on the ground images, while major media kept their cameras trained largely on the Taj and Oberoi Trident hotels. Update 6:52 pm ET: Here's an interview with Vinu on Wired: Threat Level
• Global Voices, where editor Neha Viswanathan is rounding up posts from regional bloggers -- including Pakistani bloggers condemning the attacks, a very welcome counterpoint to official statements relayed via traditional media that suggest the Indian government way well reflexively blame outsiders for the attacks.
• Wikipedia's "November 2008 Mumbai attacks" page is being continually updated.
• NowPublic has written, photo and video coverage that's being steadily updated by non-pro journalism contributors. Video from NPTV, which seems to be India's CNN, seems to hit here well before it makes it onto American news outlets.

Journalist Amy Gahran is steadily updating a list of social media following the situation Mumbai. She has also made a point of noting the downside to this flood of firsthand non-pro reporting: Bad information can easily gain traction and either fool the credible, or provide sloppy and/or hurried journalists with enough rope to hang themselves:

This morning, as I check in on the still-unfolding news about yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, I noticed a widely repeated rumor: allegedly, the Indian government asked Twitter users to stop tweeting info about the location and activities of police and military, out of concern that this could aid the terrorists...

This supposedly official request was picked up by the BBC and other outlets.

Sensing that something was off, Amy, who as far as I know is not under the regular employ of the BBC or another outlet, took it upon herself to track down the bona fides of this Twitter user, "MumbaiUpdates." She discovered that he is apparently a a high school junior based in Boston named Mark Bao, apparently not in Mumbai at this time. This young man's New England-based tweets about government alerts in Mumbai were reported practically as fact by one of the world's most respected news outlets.

Amy summed it up this way:

The bottom line here is: Media is increasingly unmediated. People are communicating directly. We don’t all have to be journalists, but we’d all be better off by adopting stronger media-literacy skills.

Specifically, when you hear something that sounds surprising or important, CHECK OR ASK FOR THE PRIMARY SOURCE before you share the news. It’s really not heard to do, and it’s a crucial step.

Update, 10:12 AM ET, Nov. 28: Mark Bao contacted me via Change.com direct message to say that his Twitter message was not the first in the "please stop tweeting" contagation:

In response to your blog post about Twitter and Mumbai, there was a misunderstanding that I conversed with Amy with. She has updated her blog article accordingly. In a nutshell, I wasn't the first person to report the news, but rather it was a RT [[a "re-tweet:" re-posting to one's own Twitter network a message that was originally posted by another Twitter user]] on Twitter that was from a trusted source that was in Mumbai at that time.

Later, CNN-IBN and other news outlets said that the Mumbai government did not want live updates, including from news outlets. Also, I mentioned a few times on the stream that my information from the CNN-IBN and NDTV.

*My* tweet was not the cause of the BBC response. Instead, it was the police requesting media to do so. In other news, the request for live updates originated not from me, but from the police in Mumbai. In fact, I was nowhere among the 1st tier of people receiving this information.

The entire thing was blown out of proportion, and apparently I'm given the blame for it because it looks like I was the first to post about it. I wasn't.

I hope that provides some valuable information for a better understanding of the situation.

Amy Gahran adds on her blog:

I’m really glad that Bao elaborated on this, and I’d like to say that I think he did a good job with quickly starting the MumbaiUpdates account to aggregate information on the attacks in India.

Parsing out Bao’s response, it looks like we still don’t know the exact source of this rumor’s first report, but apparently it might have come from a Twitter user in Mumbai. He also said it was “confirmed by video” — but we don’t know where that video was, whether that confirmation was an on-camera statement by police, whether someone was relaying on video information they’d gotten first-hand from the police, or whether someone was simply repeating an unsourced rumor on video.

If you have any further information on this (especially specific links, cites, video clips, etc.), please leave that information in a comment to this post.

What's Social Media Got To Do With Global Warming?

My thoughts on how this all applies to stopping global warming are currently in the form of questions. Could social media like blogs and Twitter be used to:

• Give all those people who understand that global warming is an acute crisis practical and meaningful ways to contribute to helping stop it?
• Support good science and kill disinformation cold?
• Connect and mobilize American citizens to support of strong federal laws that cap carbon, advance clean energy generation, transform petro-dependent agriculture, and get started on the many other undeniably difficult tasks to come?

And if blogs, Twitter, participatory journo sites, or other current technologies aren't the right social media/social network tools to apply to solving this problem, what are?

Just a couple days ago, the respected news site Politico published an astonishingly poorly-reported article about global warming. Under the guise of covering the diminishing cadre of U.S. legislators opposed to federal climate change action, this reporter covered bad science as credible, political advocacy thinly bearded as science, and even lent authority a hoary old doubt-about-climate-change petition hoax. The article also failed to shed light on the motivations or activities of the lawmakers who continue to promote unsupported doubts about human-cause climate destabilization, and the scientists on the fringe of their own profession who do the same.

Politico was called out by Dave Roberts at Grist. Politico even ran Grist's more formal letter cataloging the article's mistakes. But Grist's just one small team of editors, reporters and bloggers who can't catch every bad act.*

Thanks to what the smart, compassionate social mediators behind Mumbai Help learned in another crisis four years ago, they were prepared to mobilize themselves and others worldwide to get out reliable information during a terrorist siege. Independent journalist Amy Gahran drilled down on a potentially damaging rumor that could have undercut Mumbai Help's efforts a potential rumor that, while now somewhat better accounted for, demonstrates that many journalists and social media users need to become more media-literate, to push the benefits of these tools to their potential best -- and also minimizing the potential harms.

Global warming is a much slower-moving emergency than terrorist attacks, but it's as much of a crisis, with just as much damaging information flying around. There ought to be more effective ways we can capitalize on the social media-meets-civil society combo to solve it.

* Disclosure: I have written for Grist frequently in the past four years, and (happily) count several Gristies as professional colleagues.

 
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Image, top: Site of one bomb blast in Mumbai, shortly after attack occurred on Nov 26, 2008. By Vinu Ranganathan.

Image: Google map of the terrorist attack locations in Mumbai.