07/04/14: SOCIAL MEDIA PROS AND CONS AND HURRICANE ARTHUR

This week Arthur started as a storm in the Atlantic that now is expected to make landfall as I am posting this today as a Category 2 hurricane, with peak winds around 105 mph.  On the right you see is an enhanced infrared satellite (GOCE) image of Andrew at 7:15 am EDT (NASA).

I wish all in the East coast to be safe and ready paying attention to announcements, evacuations, warnings and of course, staying safe with social media updates. 

This current event made me change my initial post about how to be safe in social media adding first pros and cons, in particular when we deal with catastrophes like this hurricane.

PROS

Most emergency agencies are currently encouraging the use of social media during disasters. As an example, the Mississippi Emergency Agency (MEMA), the second most followed state management emergency in the country behind New Jersey, primarily uses Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as vehicles to get the message out, in addition to most traditional approaches (TV, newspapers, radio, etc).

This is not a new trend. As Susan Brooks (2014) points out, during Hurricane Sandy, millions of Americans turned to Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram for information about the storm’s projected track, the location of streets and towns that were flooded, how to place requests for federal help, and the location of open shelters. According to information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), social media users sent over 20 million Sandy-related tweets during the height of the storm despite the severe cellphone and power outages. Eleven years earlier, hundreds of families in the same neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey waited for hours to hear from relatives due to the same types of outages.

CONS

There were many instances of this as Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Northeast. Many false reports of evacuations came out. Many photos of the destruction also went viral. Though most of these images were in fact real, they were just from different times (some months or years ago). It made it difficult to decipher the true information, like the evacuation of NYU Hospital’s NICU and PICU (more information: Steve Parker, Jr (@sparkerjr).

A SAFE SOCIAL MEDIA

There is a nice summary about the risks of posting in social media I’d like to share with you. As you can see, the article explain the backlash when you make your information public: identity theft, damaged reputation, threats, cyber bulling.. As someone said on TV yesterday, ‘we are our own enemy’, we give away our privacy the moment we post something’. Something to think about.

HOW TO BE SAFE IN SOCIAL MEDIA FROM MY STUDENTS TO ME

For this portion, I asked my students (all adults) for their opinion. It happens that what they told me was exactly what I would have told them. It is nice when it all works out..(: These are their (and my) strategies when dealing with social media:

·         Use nicknames if you deal with minors (names, pictures)
·         Never post your current location. If you want to post something about a place (let’s say in Facebook), wait until you are back home to do so. If you post: ‘I am going to such park in 1h’, well, some people might follow you for the wrong reasons.
·         Do not post anything personal or something that you might regret in the future (potential bosses will see everything you post)
·         Once in the Web, always in the web (even if you think you deleted it…). Use caution.

Happy 4^th of July!