Robbie Zebleckis's List: Reflections of Digital Citizenship

• The U.S. Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), a free, SMS-based emergency alert system, was deployed for the first time since it became operational six months ago, largely with successful results. In fact, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission asks people in emergencies to use SMS when possible, in part because SMS is generally reliable, even when networks aren’t fully operational, and in part because SMS is highly efficient and reduces congestion on cell networks. NBC News notes that people can even use SMS to pull information from the Internet when they otherwise lack web access. In New York City, community relief operations created an SMS-based reporting platform, among other tech-related reporting tools. Here in Washington, D.C., the Washington Post requested reports of power outages via SMS.
• One intriguing aspect of communication was that as the emergency unfolded, information sharing became increasingly specific to location, starting with general observations about the anticipated effects on the U.S. mid-Atlantic region, then on the New York City metropolitan area, then Lower Manhattan and Hoboken, N.J., as those areas took the brunt of the storm in that region. On Twitter, hash tags were first created for the storm, then broken out by city, e.g., #SandyDC or #SandyNYC. Over time, community members were working in a nonlinear, moderately coordinated way to share critical information, and this phenomenon is not unique to Hurricane Sandy or to the United States.

• Facebook and Twitter mentions of “Hurricane Sandy” skyrocketed, and Instagram saw 10 photos uploaded per second during the height of the storm on Monday.
• Shashank Tripathi, decided to use the viral news peg to spread misinformation about the storm, including posts that said the New York Stock Exchange floor was under three feet of water and that Con Edison was shutting all power off in Manhattan.
• Now Tripathi has a decent amount of followers – approximately 6,000 – and the media picked up on some of the false information he was spreading, adding confusion to the mass amount of chaos already consuming the East Coast news cycle.
• His motivation for starting the rumors is unclear, but the consequences are. Tripathi resigned from his position with Congress candidate Christopher Wright’s campaign, issued a public apology, and may actually face legal repercussions. According to Buzzfeed, New York City Councilman Peter Vallone has asked the Manhattan District Attorney’s office to investigate the matter
• The simple act of tweeting out unsubstantiated information resulted in the likes of established, respected news sources like CNN and The Weather Channel picking up and further spreading the news — and thus, further spreading the panic.
• A bevy of inaccurate images spread like wildfire thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, including this now-immortalized photo
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• Roughly one in four cellphone towers in the path of Hurricane Sandy went out of service. It was a frustrating and potentially dangerous experience for customers without a landline to fall back on. Now, local officials and communications experts are pushing providers to improve their performance during natural disasters.
• Roughly one in four cellphone towers in the path of Hurricane Sandy went out of service. It was a frustrating and potentially dangerous experience for customers without a landline to fall back on. Now, local officials and communications experts are pushing providers to improve their performance during natural disasters.
• Lori McCaskill lives in Brooklyn, and when Sandy hit last October, her Verizon cell service went out. She couldn't work. She couldn't check in with family and friends. Her sister was due to have a baby any day.
• To prepare for the next disaster, Schnirman wants better access to "Cell on Wheels," or COWs. They're cell towers that can be moved from place to place. He wants backup power, like generators, at cell towers. And he wants better access to the cell providers themselves. He said he didn't even know whom to call during Sandy.

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• As Hurricane Sandy battered the East Coast, flooding homes, submerging cars and taking lives, Colleen Marron could only wonder if her family was safe.
• From her college in Maine, Marron, 20, couldn't reach her parents, two brothers and sister -- who declined to evacuate their Long Beach, N.Y. home -- because cell service in the Long Island community had failed.
• One year after Hurricane Sandy triggered a communications blackout across the country's most populous region, city governments, federal regulators and wireless carriers are still grappling with how to keep cell phones working in a disaster. Phone companies have come under pressure to ensure they can provide service in emergencies, and while they have taken steps to bolster their networks, many question whether it will be enough for the next big storm.
• "But there was no cell phone service for anybody," he said. "No matter who you had: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint. It was like being in the dark."
• Others weren't so lucky. Without cell service, one Long Beach resident walked nearly two miles to City Hall after the storm to notify someone that her mother had just died of natural causes, according to city manager Jack Schnirman.
• "After Sandy hit, far too many impacted residents struggled to get service because far too many cell towers were rendered inoperable,"
• One person in need of reassuring is Schnirman, the Long Beach city manager. In the days after Hurricane Sandy slammed into Long Beach, the city of 33,000 people was “in complete communications darkness,” he said.
• Every cell tower in the Long Island community stopped working and representatives from wireless companies were nowhere to be found, he said.

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• Four months after Hurricane Sandy flooded the streets of lower Manhattan, 94 businesses in the area are still lacking phone and Internet service

• After Hurricane Sandy, survivors needed, in addition to safety and power, the ability to communicate. Yet in parts of New York City, mobile communications services were knocked out for days.
• The problem? The companies that provide them had successfully resisted Federal Communications Commission calls to make emergency preparations, leaving New Yorkers to rely on the carriers’ voluntary efforts.
• At the moment, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Verizon Communications Inc. is attempting to legally bar Congress and the FCC from exerting any authority over its networks, claiming that the First Amendment protects the company’s “editorial discretion.”

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• All four of the major cell phone companies said subscribers in patches of their territories hit by the hurricane have been experiencing outages.
• In New York City, residents in downtown Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens complained that AT&T's wireless service was unavailable. Meanwhile, customers further uptown had service continuously. AT&T confirmed that there were outages in some areas. And the company said it is working to assess the damage and fix the affected areas.
• Sprint provided some detail as to what may be causing the outages. The company said in a statement that in some cases where there was power loss and/or flooding, cell site backhaul connections were lost. Some damage was caused by damaging debris.

• T-Mobile also acknowledged disruptions and blamed outages on high winds and weather conditions.

   

  "Due to the impacts of Sandy, T-Mobile customers may be experiencing service disruptions or an inability to access service in some areas, especially those that were hardest hit by the storm," the company said in a statement. "T-Mobile rapid response engineering teams are assessing the situation and we are moving as quickly as possible."
• Verizon Communications reported this morning that its Fios voice, video, and Internet customers as well as some traditional voice and DSL Internet customers in the New York City area experienced outages due to flooding at several Verizon central offices in lower Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island City. The company said that two switching centers have been most affected with power failures. Back-up power has also been affected, the company said in a statement. The sites were on battery power, but because power was running out there, the company was forced to shut down power at some of these sites.

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• From Fab.com to Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc, e-commerce companies scrambled on Tuesday to get goods to buyers on time after Hurricane Sandy tore a swathe of destruction across the U.S. northeast.

   

  The storm -- which severed power to warehouses and offices, ripped up rails and roads and shuttered airports -- challenged the notion that Internet retailers might benefit from problems at store chains exposed to the elements.

  Fab.com, a fast-growing design e-commerce start-up based in New York City, handled unusually strong volumes on Monday as people hunkered down at home. Then the problems began.

  Fab operates out of two warehouses in hard-hit New Jersey, one self-owned and another run by warehouse company Dotcom Distribution. With both lacking power as of mid-afternoon, no packages were making it out the door on Tuesday.
• "The biggest impact to us right now is that our warehouses have no power," said Jason Goldberg, founder and chief executive of Fab.com. "We're doing everything humanly possible to send packages as quickly as possible."
• Retailers from New York to Washington are starting to re-open and re-staff in the aftermath of Monday's destruction. But many of Fab.com's fellow Internet retailers were still struggling to fill orders, handle customer service and keep websites running ahead of the crucial holiday season.
• Amazon.com warned merchants on Tuesday that use its shipping service, Fulfillment by Amazon, that Sandy might impact the handling of orders. Third-party sellers on its marketplace that handle their own shipping were instructed to contact shoppers directly about their orders.
• Because the Internet is an opaque purchasing method, customers don't always understand where their product is coming from or if they are going to be affected," said Eric Heller, head of Marketplace Ignition, which helps online retailers sell through websites such as Amazon.com. "We're encouraging sellers to proactively reach out to buyers that may be affected."
• EBay pursued a similar tactic, emailing shoppers who purchased items from merchants that may have been impacted by the storm in recent days, asking for patience. It recommended that affected eBay Store-subscribers put their pages in "vacation mode" to control purchasing and show shoppers that their operation has been temporarily disrupted, a spokeswoman said.
• Beyond logistics tangles, loss of power and telecommunications have hurt Internet firms that rely on telephone and Web-based customer service in the absence of store staff.

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• Throughout the storm, NYC Digital, a part of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, monitored social media for public reactions to the storm, sending reports to City Hall on a daily basis. Questions asked on Twitter were responded to directly, and the city’s Tumblr account and Facebook page published information from each press conference. The public could sign up to receive text alerts from the Mayor’s Office Twitter account, @nycmayorsoffice, which served as a great alternative digital resource to the city’s website, once people lost power and Internet access.
   
   FEMA also used social media heavily in addition to traditional means, sharing information and engaging the public across multiple channels both on and offline, including face to face, television, radio, print and digital (Web, social and mobile) for preparedness prior to landfall, and to provide actionable, practical, relevant and current information to those in the affected areas and others outside of the storm’s path. FEMA published a Sandy-specific page on FEMA.gov as a one-stop-shop for all Sandy-related information, and stood up Sandy-specific Facebook and Twitter profiles as well.
• Throughout Hurricane Sandy, the public turned to social media for updates and assistance, and more than ever before, response agencies, organizations and community groups used social media to organize and direct resources where needed. Twitter and Facebook were used extensively by individuals, first responder agencies and utility companies to relay messages and information, share evacuation orders and provide updates on the storm. For example, the New York Office of Emergency Management provided hourly updates and evacuation orders via Twitter, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie relayed updates about the storm, aid and evacuation orders via his personal Twitter account.
• Throughout Hurricane Sandy, the public turned to social media for updates and assistance, and more than ever before, response agencies, organizations and community groups used social media to organize and direct resources where needed. Twitter and Facebook were used extensively by individuals, first responder agencies and utility companies to relay messages and information, share evacuation orders and provide updates on the storm. For example, the New York Office of Emergency Management provided hourly updates and evacuation orders via Twitter, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie relayed updates about the storm, aid and evacuation orders via his personal Twitter account.
• Throughout Hurricane Sandy, the public turned to social media for updates and assistance, and more than ever before, response agencies, organizations and community groups used social media to organize and direct resources where needed. Twitter and Facebook were used extensively by individuals, first responder agencies and utility companies to relay messages and information, share evacuation orders and provide updates on the storm. For example, the New York Office of Emergency Management provided hourly updates and evacuation orders via Twitter, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie relayed updates about the storm, aid and evacuation orders via his personal Twitter account.
• Throughout Hurricane Sandy, the public turned to social media for updates and assistance, and more than ever before, response agencies, organizations and community groups used social media to organize and direct resources where needed. Twitter and Facebook were used extensively by individuals, first responder agencies and utility companies to relay messages and information, share evacuation orders and provide updates on the storm. For example, the New York Office of Emergency Management provided hourly updates and evacuation orders via Twitter, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie relayed updates about the storm, aid and evacuation orders via his personal Twitter account.
• Even before Hurricane Sandy, the city’s social media presence attracted 3 million followers across more than 300 city accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more. In addition to managing NYC.gov, the city maintains numerous channels, including Facebook pages, Flickr, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter (in both English and Spanish) and YouTube. Throughout response and recovery to the storm, these channels provided the city with the means to share information in various formats, enabling people to find and consume information as they preferred. 
• Government agencies and others turned to online technologies to communicate with the public like never before.
• Hurricane Sandy marked a shift in the use of social media in disasters. More than ever before, government agencies turned to mobile and online technologies. Before, during and after Sandy made landfall, government agencies throughout the Northeast used social media to communicate with the public and response partners, share information, maintain awareness of community actions and needs, and more.

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