Haiti: Social media failure?

In last week’s post, I pondered the possibility of a new media takeover.

Typically, however, that same day I came across a particularly persuasive editorial column that debunked my prior musings entirely.

Joshua Keating’s article in Foreign Policy marks a personal moment of realization that perhaps social media is not the saviour the journalistic profession has been waiting for. Oh great.

In the article, Keating deflated the hype surrounding the social media coverage of the ongoing Haiti crisis.

While Keating praised the micro-blogging site for its profound influence on the tumultuous Iranian political scene in June 2009, which many have since coined “a Twitter revolution,” he is far less gracious in regards to this latest coverage. In fact, Keating even goes so far as to dub the Haitian earthquake reporting as the first “Twitter Disaster.”

Keating explained that while the media circus surrounding Haiti is surely an interesting phenomenon, those contributing to social networking sites today are failing to provide valuable, let alone credible, newsworthy updates.

Keating said, “Haiti-related tweets seem to consist of either expressions of personal sympathy for the victims of the quake or links to news articles from other sites.” At the end of the day, Keating explained that the sheer manpower and professional capabilities of news organizations appeared to beat out Twitter’s volunteer base in the reporting of ‘real news’.

Interestingly, this is very different than what happened in Iran.

Where, as the Iranian government barred the press from entering the country, the mainstream media grew increasingly dependent on Twitter updates. On some occasions, according to the Washington Post, “The predominant information [was] coming from Twitter.”

In light of this summer’s events, and pandering to an overeager public craving up-to-the-second coverage, Twitter made the decision to rebrand itself as a news and information source in Nov. 2009.

The site did this by a seemingly simple change. Instead of asking users, “What are you doing?” when updating their statuses, the site now asked, “What’s happening?”

While the rebranding of Twitter as a news and information source has been reasonably successful, at times, it appears as though the site cannot live up to the standards we demand of traditional media.

This is something that any regular Twitter user, who undoubtedly experiences headaches stemming from site outages on a near weekly basis, can attest to.

For example, after word of aftershocks in Haiti, I hoped to see the drama unfolding first hand via #Haiti in the early morning hours of Jan. 20. However, upon attempting to log into my own Twitter account, I received the all too familiar “whale fail” image of the Twitter over capacity page.

"Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again"? Traditional media certainly would never get away with such a thing.

This was precisely the point Keating was hinting at in his article.

"In the past two decades, the news cycle has gone from the daily updates of newspapers to the up-to-the-minute coverage of cable news and the blogosphere to the up-to-the-second updates of Twitter. It's possible that we may have reached a point where information is being provided faster than users can process it, and the "news" ceases to inform at all.”

The Haiti crisis proved that social media cannot trump traditional news media just yet. However, in light of this latest exposure of social media’s current limits as a news medium, we can rest assured that the field will only better itself in the meantime.