Social media takes hold of Boston

I remember, as we all do, exactly what I was doing on 11 September 2001, when the news broke that planes had hit the twin towers in New York.

I remember how my mother came upstairs and switched on the TV - she'd heard the news on the radio and wanted to check she'd heard right. There was CNN, cycling through the horrifying footage as more facts came in.

Last week, when two bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, a similar sequence of events unfolded. Only, instead of hearing about it on radio, I heard about it on Facebook. Instead of going to CNN to check the up-to-the-minute accounts, I turned to Twitter.

The Boston Marathon bomb saga was a tragedy, albeit on a much smaller scale than 9/11, that caught the world's attention. It wasn't just the violence - as people keep pointing out, violence on this scale happens daily in other parts of the world - it was the unexpectedness. Tragedy striking during an occasion otherwise associated with joy and achievement. In a town that could be your town or mine.

Naturally, social media became a frenzy of info. From Monday through to Friday, all channels were abuzz with the latest news and speculation. From the first grizzly photos to the crowd-funding of medical treatment for victims, it became clear that social media had changed the way the world experienced tragedy. By the numbers, this event was no record-breaker; by the reaction it certainly set a precedent.

It would be great to be able to say that social media was a hero in the face of tragedy - a great army of good. There was good. But we also saw some scary examples of the true dangers of a hivemind left unchecked. To err is human after all, and once you have a bunch of humans acting together? That's a lot of 'erring' going on.

Social news and entertainment Web site Reddit made news headlines by identifying the culprits.

Only, the people Reddit identified weren't actually the culprits. And by "made" headlines, I mean "manufactured". Publications like The New York Post ran an image of completely innocent individuals on the front page. Sure, editorial was at fault for buying into the Scooby-Doo attempts of an online forum, but even if they hadn't actually published the story, Reddit was no doubt responsible for starting a witch hunt.

Crowdsourcing has been gaining momentum recently. The idea is that none of us is as clever as all of us; we're capable of so much more if we can do it in a group. We can fund projects that will make a difference; we can raise money for charity; we can solve global problems. Is it any wonder that people attempted to apply the same mentality to solving a crime?

The problem is, crowdsourcing solutions to a crime is nothing new. It even has a name: vigilantism.

That said, crowdsourcing was also used for good. A number of victims who didn't have medical aid had their hospital bills paid for by strangers from around the world. The most notable of these stories: the man who identified the real suspects (who lost his legs in the tragedy). He has medical insurance, but not enough to cover the extent of the care he'll need from now on (prosthetics, etc). So his friends started an Internet campaign to raise money, and at the time of writing, had managed to raise over $620 000.

When Boston went into lockdown on Friday, it was like something out of a movie. The zombie kind. Empty streets, men with guns, people told to stay in their houses. How could we not watch? How could we not share any little titbit of information we came across?

The problem is, I guess the world kind of forgot the baddies might have access to the great news machine we call social media too. The Boston PD had to issue a statement asking folks to please stop tweeting their location constantly. It kind of interfered with their house-to-house search for the suspect.

Social media had changed the way the world experienced tragedy.

Another example of the infinite stupidity (I have to call it that, the alternative is "infinite crassness") of human beings acting on emotions first and logic later, is the picture of a "victim" that went viral on Facebook.

The picture was of the little girl who died in the bomb blast. Only, it was, in fact, a little boy who died. The picture was a fake and it managed to spread much faster than the official news. Luckily, it didn't appear to be spread with malevolent intent. It could have easily asked people to donate towards her family or something equally monetarily motivated. And we probably all would have handed over our credit card details.

Social media lets us spread news and ideas quicker than ever, but this can be dangerous as long as we keep our "click first, ask questions later" mentality.

Then there's the question of how much is too much? Having the pictures and the videos and the tweets coming straight out of a tragedy makes me think of what they say about the Vietnam War. People being able to see what was really happening had a profound effect on the American public.

Now we have that effect amplified. Knowledge is power, yes. Sometimes. Knowledge can also be the opposite. Too much knowledge can create confusion, guilt and distress. It can also be used to intentionally create panic. I'm not going to put on a foil hat or anything, but if the powers that be did decide to put a whole nation into a state where they were willing to give up their human rights and the rights of others, this has shown to be quite an effective method.

With the constant barrage of updates, you feel you have to look, you have to care. More than that, you have to care about the specific thing that everyone else is telling you to care about.

A lot happened last week that we didn't see at all. The great promise of social media was that it would democratise coverage. What this theory fails to take into account is that the news values that govern traditional media outlets are in fact driven by the people, what people want to see. In the face of a news story this juicy, no one wanted to be told news about anything else.

The problems with social media are, in a sense, the same problems we face with traditional media: coverage is weighted towards the sensational, skewing of coverage can happen, the media can draw incorrect conclusions, and coverage can compromise security. The key difference is that, while traditional media has checks and balances to prevent these things from happening (supposedly), on social media, those checks and balances are us.

Each one of us is responsible for our own actions. Whether we're theorising about someone's identity or circulating pictures that might be fake, the buck stops at our very own fingertips.