Last year, when the tragic shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech occurred, I thought that campuses should really embrace a tool like Twitter in order to keep students and staff abreast of crisis situations.
12 months later, Twitter is more than just fun - it’s on the verge of life-saving for some. In her post, How Twitter Saves Lives, Anne Jackson blogged about how people communicated the whereabouts of a tornado using Twitter.
This is tremendous stuff, people. When you’re in a basement, you’re probably not watching TV, which will only give you a radar’s assumption of where a tornado is.
Twitter offers real time, real information. If you read Anne’s post you’ll notice that the siren system didn’t completely work because power was lost. But Twitter was still able to be utilized.
I’m guessing some people couldn’t use their phones. If power was lost - it probably depended on how you were connecting to the internet via your phone, which depends on device, carrier, etc.
If anyone can offer up further insight into the tech vs. nature side of things, that would be greatly appreciated.
In the meantime, Twitter on - for fun and in crisis.
This thing has 2 Comments
thanks for the link! follow me on twitter and you’ll probably see a LOT more tornado tweets…spring in oklahoma!
Terrific way to encourage the use of Twitter. It has so many uses. Romance, good causes, emergencies, social media, news breaks..just so many.