Robert Thomas's List: 3.6 Research

• Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the United States about 8 p.m. EDT Oct. 29, striking near Atlantic City, N.J., with winds of 80 mph. A full moon made high tides 20 percent higher than normal and amplified Sandy's storm surge. Streets were flooded, trees and power lines knocked down and the city's famed boardwalk was ripped apart. Along the Jersey shore, people were left stranded in their homes and waited for rescue teams in boats to rescue them. More than 80 homes were destroyed in one fire in Queens. Several other fires were started throughout the New York metro area.

   

    Seawater surged over Lower Manhattan's seawalls and highways and into low-lying streets. The water inundated tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers Wall Street and sent hospital patients and tourists scrambling for safety. Skyscrapers swayed and creaked in winds that partially toppled a crane 74 stories above Midtown. A large tanker ship ran aground on the city's Staten Island.
• • great facts about the magnitude of Hurricane Sandy on the US.

• As it unfolded, a different confluence of factors — namely the simultaneous rise and ubiquity of Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, along with the endless churn of the 24-hour news cycle — combined to create another hybrid vortex in which the virtual community experienced the storm both in seclusion and all together. We all watched through our screens first, interacting all the while, and out the window second.
• • this speaks to the age we now live in, the digital citizen age.
• From the Super Bowl to the movie theater shootings in Aurora, social media has altered the collective experience of every major news event, providing platforms for both insta-reactions and commentary, as well as news gathering and sharing (and with them, the potential for errors and embarrassment).
• rom the Super Bowl to the movie theater shootings in Aurora, social media has altered the collective experience of every major news event, providing platforms for both insta-reactions and commentary, as well as news gathering and sharing (and with them, the potential for errors and embarrassment).
• Hurricane Sandy represents New York City first's social media disaster, in which the most current and continuous stream of information flowed not from television, radio, or other forms of transitional media, but online, and in line with the long-hyped promise of citizen journalism, often from amateurs.
• • insight into the emergence of the digital citizen
• this hurricane is being marked as a coming-of-age moment for Instagram
• which saw uploads of up to ten images per second tagged #Sandy during the storm. Those images spread mostly on Twitter and Facebook, while sites like #Instacane rounded them all up, and old-school media outfits like Time, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times — all relying in part on the social-media-optimized live-blog format — were forced to cull from these pools, doing their best to verify authenticity along the way.
• There's an emotional component as well. The virtual campfire of social media counters the isolation of being evacuated, quarantined, and cut off from all transit by hosting a congregation of common experience. Watching live network coverage on television or reading a newspaper account the next morning are both narrow and passive in a way that the Internet is not; instead of maxing out at the spectacle of a windblown newscaster, online the channels are infinite and customizable, the vantage points varied.
• • this point speaks to one of the many positive sides of social media during a time of emergency.

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• • this speaks to privacy issues not yet ironed out for the digital citizen.
• as Hurricane Sandy began to flood the streets of lower Manhattan, many New Yorkers began to receive an unexpected message: a text alert on their mobile phones that strongly urged them to seek shelter.
• Not all New Yorkers received an emergency alert during Sandy because not all mobile devices have the necessary hardware installed or have updated relevant software. In May 2011, new iPhones and Android devices already had the chip. (Most older phones, not so much.)
• • speaks to the need for this (which has the potential to do more good than harm) to be available to all digital citizens.

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• Twitter created a page dedicated to Sandy that include accounts of government, politicians, public safety officials and weather reports.

  The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tweeted direction for finding shelters using SMS messages.
• The Fire Department of New York tweeted incidents of major fires through the night via Twitter. According to Yahoo News, the FDNY even had a dedicated person monitoring its Twitter account to respond to people tweeting emergencies. Emily Rahimi, the FDNY's social media manager, responded to over 100 tweets overnight.
• • Social Media at it's finest.

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• “During an emergency, information is like gold,” Gail J. McGovern, president and CEO of the Red Cross
• • great quote