Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Twitter lovers, justifying Twitter’s existence, have always talked much about the ability to share information and reports news “faster than the networks”. They should watch out with that one.  In regards to the Swine flu outbreak in the U.S, Evgeny Morozov states that Twitter has done its part to create am “unnecessary global panic” about the flu, and what could be done to prevent this from happening.

Evgeny does point out that the fault is the twitterers and their practices themselves, trying to fit in:

Thus, Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.

Evgeny continues to state that Twitters use to shape conversation in most cases is no problem, but in the case of serious topics, such as this one, something should be done about it to avoid panic or even conspiracies. I agree with the analysis, but I have to say that Evgeny starts panic-mongering, too:

I think it’s only a matter of time before that the next generation of cyber-terrorists – those who are smart about social media, are familiar with modern information flows, and are knowledgeable about human networks – take advantage of the escalating fears over the next epidemic and pollute the networked public sphere with scares that would essentially paralyze the global economy. Often, such tactics would bring much more destruction than the much-feared cyberwar and attacks on physical – rather than human – networks.

All sorts of media have been used to misinform people intentionally, or unintentionally. Now that we are in a networked age, people themselves can misinform other people. It’s called empowerment. What are you gonna do? Turn off the Internet?

No matter what people will use and abuse media for their own personal gain. And yeah, a lot of the content out their is mindless and stupid. But this is true for all channels, even the ones that claim to do “objective reporting”. It’s up to individuals, organisations and even governments to put in their own stake, not to try to control it through bodies with political agendas.

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