Tweeting the mundane in the madness. The power of Twitter in times of crisis.
I came across this piece today, written in the New Yorker after the devastation in Haiti, last year. It caught my eye, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was looking at the challenge for journalists in conveying the scale of suffering in disasters such as Haiti. Where does a story start amongst such devastation, who’s stories form the narrative over others’ suffering?
Steve Coll writes:
I learned something about journalism while covering my first earthquake, in northwest Iran, in June, 1990. Tens of thousands of people died. After some travail, a small group of us newspaper and broadcast correspondents from the West arrived by helicopter, after dark, in a flattened village. I was still pretty green but I had seen enough death and devastation by then to know that it would not affect me emotionally. Nonetheless, as I stumbled into the village off the helicopter, I felt paralyzed, professionally. There were no houses or buildings left standing; there were so many dead; there was so much audible suffering. What was one supposed to write in one’s notebook to capture and convey this scene?
It’s something that a lot of journalists can quite probably relate to. The series of natural disasters in Australia, has exposed more journalists to this dilemma. The floods in Brisbane, the cyclone that followed – these were extraordinary events in the history of Australia. For those not there, the devastation was hard to fathom. But I, like many other Australians, stayed glued to Twitter, as Yasi passed over Queensland. Some of the addiction came from the constant updating of news. But for me, more importantly, a larger story formed from the tapestry of tweets, a story woven together and loosely knitted by the hundreds of people sitting in their houses as the cyclone passed.
“Our lights have gone out now”, “We can hear the windows rattling”, and “It’s eerily quiet now, must be the eye,” are not quotes that would make the news. But that night, in the face of the unknown approaching, it was an insight into the fear of so many in that moment. And, in some strange way, a lot of us felt as if we were there.
And this was also where the New Yorker article caught my attention. Steve Coll writes:
My memory of what followed is vivid. I was in the company of one of those lions of foreign correspondence at the Los Angeles Times—I think it was Rone Tempest. Perhaps he noticed that I seemed confused. Anyway, he said—grunted, actually—like some veteran baseball player spitting tobacco in a nineteen-thirties movie: “Make lists—all the little things.” And so I did. A tin cooking pot with rice still in it. Five boots, none matching. A bicycle wheel protruding from a pile of rocks. Like that. We rode back to Tehran that night on a bus. I wrote my story on one of those ancient Radio Shack portables. When I flipped through my notebook with a flashlight, I gradually came to realize that I had something particular—and for American audiences so distanced from revolutionary Iran—something useful to say.
Sometimes, in the rush to denounce Twitter or even to talk it up as the ultimate breaking news source, we forget that it’s the little things that count. It’s the small stories in the bigger drama that make it so real. The mundane among the madness. The one voice among hundreds.
I was captivated, like many, by the recent events in Egypt. Late one night I came across the stream of @ bloggerseif. I think I found his tweets from Andy Carvin, who did an amazing job of creating a “curated” twitter stream of all that was going on. That’s a story in itself. But, that night, it was Ali Seif’s (I do not know if that is his real name) tweets that made the whole situation so real for me. In the chaos of that night, his often disjointed and emotive tweets, told the story of a small child they found; lost among the chaos in Tehran square. They had no way of knowing if the baby’s parents were alive, or even who he was. I think he could only say his name. Amazingly, they located the child’s parents the next day. It was hugely emotional to read, but I felt like I had some insight (and empathy!) to the bigger picture through the tweets of Ali Sief and the plight of this little child – that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the revolution around them.
I think Coll is right, it is about little things.
But that’s what makes Twitter such an invaluable form of journalism.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/2010/01/earthquakes-and-journalism.html#ixzz1EaGchNbf