A Twitter-nami

I found these two visual representations of maps from Twitter, describing the spread of information during the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. They call it a "global pulse" and both play as videos, allowing you to see how quickly people tweeted from Japan and responded from other parts of the world as lines connect these countries across the globe extremely quickly. The lines that represent tweets quickly thicken into a colorful mass that spreads across the entire map.

This shows two important things about globalization, as well as some interesting things about emergency response. In terms of globalization, it shows just how interconnected we are, instantaneously throughout the world where communication once took months or years. Someone can send out a tweet in Japan and someone in Iceland can respond in a second, eliciting a response from someone in Israel, and so on. The global connection via the internet is really quite astonishing; however, it also belies much global inequality between those who can tweet immediately and those who cannot. The little dots and lines representing tweets pass over Africa, slide by most of South America, and do not include anything from Eastern Russia. There are only certain parts of the world able to participate in this global interconnectedness, as they are "developed" and have access to the internet while others do not even have access to clean water. It seems our global priorities are a little skewed.

However, there was, as shown by the first map that showed the rate of responses, a huge outpouring of tweets the moment the earthquake occurred. One can only hope this represented concern and support, and maybe surprise, from those outside of Japan. What is surprising somewhat is the number of tweets from within Japan while the earthquake is occurring--with smart and iphones today, I suppose one can indeed run to safety while telling the world about it at the same time.