[Air-L] twittering while California burns

[Jankowski]

Ben:

Thanks for sharing these sites related to how Internet-based 
communication venues are being used by people (and by professional 
media) wanting / needing to know about the California fires. I am 
sure you are right that a wave of studies will emerge around news and 
communication flow, and around the fusion of professional media with 
Internet sites for personal communication. I can imagine theoretical 
inspiration for such studies coming, in part, from the 
half-century-old Katz and Lazarsfeld volume Personal Influence as 
well as from the examination of the flow of news immediately after 
the JFK assignation.

If there are any studies being prepared, I'd like to hear....

Nick Jankowski
*************************************************************************************************
Visiting Fellow
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
1019 AT Amsterdam, NL
www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl
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At 04:45 AM 10/24/2007, you wrote:
>I think in the next few months, we're going to see a whole lot of
>interesting research on the use of technology during the Great
>Californian Fire of 07.
>
>I've been seeing some very interesting ways of using the internet to
>pass information between people who are there and people who want to
>know what's going on. Fark.com has had a series of massive (1000+
>posts) threads about the fire (example:
>http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3155801) where
>people who are there pass on what ever info they have about
>evacuations and other important details.
>
>Slashdot has a very interesting article with comments on how the
>evacuation shelters in San Diago are wifi enabled, allowing  evacuees
>to set up blogs and use other internet tools to keep people appraised
>of their situation.
>
>Another interesting article on the subject can be found at
>http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9802911-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware
>.
>
>It's becoming apparent that these fires represent the largest civilian
>movement since the Civil War. It's already outsized Katerina it terms
>of people temporarily displaced from their houses. While the damage is
>going to be much less, it is very interesting to see how people are
>adapting technology very quickly for emergency use.
>
>Ben Spigel
>Department of Geography
>The Ohio State University
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