The social media is wonderful!!
I did a mini survey and asked many of my friends how they learnt about the earthquake in Japan, and most of them said that they first heard it through Twitter or Facebook.
This may be due to the fact that the youths in Singapore are so technology savvy, reliant and absorbed that social media is more often than not the platform with which we use to communicate with our peers, family, organisations, institutions and probably even the government.
Personally, I was alerted of the earthquake via Twitter and then kept myself updated of the earthquake and tsunami through the CNN’s website, where live news stream of the calamity was broadcasted. I was actually very anxious in that period because my relative was in the States and I had to keep myself updated on the possibility that there may be a tsunami washing over the area he was in. The tsunami alert was up, but thankfully, there was adequate time for the people there to move to higher ground, so he is safe.
This is a print screen of the site, however, the video was already taken down, sorry about that!
I was vigilant for the better part of the night, and the trends on Twitter were flooded with #prayforJapan and #Earthquakes which made it easy for users to catch up on what the world was taking about and happening in Japan.
Rumours even sprung up, such as that of Yuko Yamaguchi (the Hello Kitty creator) and Satoshi Tajiri (the Pokemon creator) dying due to the disaster. They became twitter trends in no time as more and more people retweeted it. According to tweetbeat.com, a staggering number of 11,284 people tweeted about Satoshi Tajiri’s death in the tsunami within the time frame of 24 hours (Sunday Mar 13, 09:45 pm – Monday Mar 14, 09:45pm).
Yuko Yamaguchi (the Hello Kitty creator)
Satoshi Tajiri (the Pokemon creator)
It was viral.
On the International Business Times website, it is said that the rumours stopped only when Satoshi Tajiri posted a status on his Facebook page that he was still very much alive and that his people are also safe.
Tajiri said, “"Dear Hummingbirds, what's this nonsense about me being dead?”.
No one really knew what happened but everyone just passed the information along because they trusted their source. However, at the same time, no one really knows the root source and if it is even reliable to begin with.
So, one still needs to double, triple and quadruple check the information before accepting them even if many are talking about it. It is just like gossips really, always check your sources.
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