Twitter

This week’s class began with a bang. For the first forty-five minutes our class took a trip down to the extreme even lab. Here they had four different sections with mac computers set up. In the front of the classroom were four flat screen high definition televisions. But that wasn’t event he coolest part. The coolest part was what was known as the cave. It was this huge projector screen that had three dimension capabilities. The professor that gave us the tour and or presentation of this room showed us all the different things that it could do. Two of the examples really sparked my interest. The first thing that he showed us was an United States military map of a town in Afghanistan. This at one time was classified information that only people who had clearance would see, but it eventually got declassified and was about to be viewed by the public. It was in three dimension and different parts of the map jumped out at us, when we were using our special glasses. The next part that really amazed me was the last part of it. Here we got to see an overlay of the United States and a picture of all the different flights that came in and out of LAX. This was really cool because it showed all the different flight patterns, and all the different airlines. It was really interesting to see how some parts of the United States were covered by flight patters, but others were completely untouched.

            The next part of class we had the students do their presentations. The main topic of these presentations was twitter usage during disaster relief and for humanitarian efforts. Today, there is big controversy among top official as to if twitter and facebook should be used as a source for disaster relief. The issues are that we do not know if the information that is posted is correct or if it is even important. It is very easy for people to lie or exaggerate the truth. But on the other hand, it poses a huge benefit as well. It is a great tool for emergency responders to use because a lot of the information is live and up to date. After all, like we discussed in an earlier class, survivors are in fact the first responders. So, with that being said, the information that they post is highly informative and important. As far as my opinion on the matter of should twitter be used as a tool for emergency responders? I believe it should be a tool, and that’s it. In other words, it should be used as a guiding device and not as a form of factual information. People should not rely on twitter or facebook but use it to their advantage. Twitter has been being used for longer than most people think because it is only recently that it has been popular but in all actuality it has been used for years in disasters. I think we need to learn from past events and move forward with our technology and our emergency response process.