Researcher(s):
Meghan Cleland
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2012 Completed: May 2013 Go to project site
|
On March 11th, 2011, Japan was rocked with a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. From the first tremors felt, the people of Japan turned to social media to document the phenomenon. What resulted online after the quake represents a new piece of narrative that has not traditionally been available for the global community. Moreover, users are given the unique ability to chime in with their own thoughts, insights, emotions, and pictures- essentially any reaction they feel the urge to share with the greater network of users. To understand what this new perspective is, and how these online conversations evolve, there is value in comparing how the Twitter. Through the coding of various Tweets from three separate windows following the first six months after the quake, content categories were developed, calculated, and then compared to the results of found when coding conventional media (i.e. online news articles and scholarly sources). These were then analyzed in the context of how information is shared and disseminated, compared to the other more conventional information sources. The results show that, while there is a social hierarchy regarding which users' Tweets are most read and shared, Twitter allows all users to interact with news sources in a mutually beneficial, two-way content exchange.