Earthquake in Japan

As many of you know, Japan had the biggest earthquake in its history on Friday, March 11th. Tsunami demolished many towns along the shore, aftershocks are still occurring and people live with fear for the radiation from the broken nuclear plants. Over 10,000 people have died and another 10,000 are still missing.

Luckily, my family and friends are safe back home thanks to their locations far from the seismic center. However, they also experienced quite big quakes in Tokyo.
Today, I'd like to share my experience on 3.11 in relation to social media.

The first earthquake happened in late afternoon on Friday in Japan, which was around 2 am in the morning in New York.
I was going out that night for 2 hours, and right after I came back to my apartment at 2:30, I saw my Twitter plug-in on Firefox with more than 200 tweets. I thought, "wait...this is too many for 2 hours...what's going on?"
And then, it turned out that Twitter was full of information about the earthquake, the magnitude data from news, panic of my friends, and so on.
As soon as I realized its a huge accident, I started calling my family. However, the phone system was basically down, so I couldn't reach them at all for a few hours.

The only thing that was working perfectly fine was the Internet.
I had never appreciated the existence of Skype this much before. While the phone system was down, I was able to contact with some friends with Skype accounts. At the moment, I really wished that every single Japanese had a Skype account. Seriously.

As I was getting very nervous whether my family is safe, shocking news kept coming in through Twitter, and someone started web streaming Japanese news broadcast.
2 hours later, I finally managed to contact my sister who was going out in the middle of the city when the earthquake hit. Surprisingly, she seemed not to understand the scale of the earthquake, while I, miles away from Japan, knew all the details about it.
I strongly felt the power of the Internet and social media at crisis.

For 2 weeks since the earthquakes, SNS has been showing us what it can do differently from mass media.
While the mainstream media tend to show striking, negative news from the seismic center, Twitter has more helpful information and encouragement among the people of Japan as well as caring messages from all over the world.
Lots of charity groups both in Japan and abroad are using Facebook to spread the words to their communities.
This sad crisis in Japan made me realize the potential of the social media, taking over the mainstream media.

There is a website where encouraging Tweets with hash tags of "#prayforjapan" are put together. The website has already been translated to 10 languages.
Please visit prayforjapan.jp to see the positive viral effects of Twitter.