Hurricane Irene had shattered the lives of many in the New York City when it arrived in at the speed of 13 miles per hour. In these terrifying times, people still found time to keep the world tweeting with updates in each and every way they could. Twitter was flooded with tweets relating to the hurricane updates. It became more of a chatting hub for tweeps to work around with tweets, retweets and reply to tweets.
It looked like the terror called in more tweeps to tweet in their updates for the hurricane. Twitter feed of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg even saw him preaching caution. For the news outlets, twitter was more of a notepad for reporters,as they kept their followers updated every single minute about the hurricane and its movement. Even the damage and wind gusts took up many tweets from the news outlets. An ABC News producer, Michael Milberger tweeted, “Just lost power in Brooklyn…. on my ipad. It’s ok recharging now”.
Users had innovative ways to keep up with the storm updates as they shared Twentieth Century Fox Scenes from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. The scenes posted had the Statue of Liberty being destroyed in a tidal wave. It was maybe one of the stunts used to kill boredom by the users. Many comedians and cub reporters even saw themselves emerging because of the disaster.
Tweets even had a share of criticism for those TV news anchors who had bright raincoats donned and were venturing to those streets hit by the hurricane to note and report the destruction caused by Irene. The indicated criticism was for Anderson Cooper of CNN, but Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, went just a step ahead to take up snaps of the New York streets with an iPhone. With rubber boots on and with considerable on-air charm, he recorded videos along with his friends. The recorded videos had fallen trees and much more. Crowley did not end his campaign there, but he went ahead to showcast the testing “capabilities”of the rubber boots.
Twitter at such times has been a chatroom for the masses, but it even has its share of misinformation too while a news breaks out. There was a photo posted by a user which was interpreted by many as Irene was approaching North Carolina or New York. However it was images of Pensacola, Florida which were taken a few weeks ago. One of the images was titled “Hurricane Irene approaching North Carolina” which had its circulation over the social networking site early Saturday evening. It moved around many tweets and then was in a flash shared by thousands of people. Even though it was a Pensacola, Florida and had nothing to do with Irene, TwitPic, a Twitter image Web site had around 270,000 views. Another image which was doing rounds during the hurricane was of the East River flooding. This was again a hoax.
These sarcastic attitude was enjoyed by many, while some were nor impressed with it. A social media consultant, Sarah Cooley tweeted, “I know this is NYC but I’m kind of over the sarcasm. There is still flooding all over the city and long island was hit really hard.” Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook has however been more positively used during such disasters as they help in updating others with the disaster.