Boing Boing shared a fascinating video up showing the spread of earthquake Tweets on Tuesday.
The green dots are tweets about earthquakes, the gray dots are tweets about other topics. Each frame covers 1 second, and the video covers 12 minutes of real time. The map was created by Eric Fischer and posted through Flickr.
This week my students in my senior-level mass media and society class have been working at developing experiments to learn about how people use social media. Most of them are trying to measure President Obama’s popularity (or lack thereof), rather than measuring some kind of effect of social media.
So I was thrilled this morning to read a blog post from Randall Munroe, the brilliant author/artist of the webcomic XKCD, about a perfect example of a real-life field experiment demonstrating the speed of social media communication.
Back about 200 comics ago, Munroe ran a strip hypothesizing that social media news could travel faster than the shockwaves of an earthquake. That is, that some people could learn about an earthquake by Twitter before they actually felt the quake.
So this week, when the East Coast was hit with an earthquake, his prediction was put to the test. (Remember that the basic principle of science is that you make a prediction based on theory that can be tested, and then test it.)
Munroe provides us with multiple accounts showing his comic prediction was correct (or at least had confirming evidence). He links to a story from the Hollywood Reporter about residents of New York talking about receiving Tweets about the quake from people closer to the epicenter before the New Yorkers felt the quake. So data point 1 – Tweets move faster than earthquakes.
He then provides us with a second example. He received an IRC message from his brother in Virginia about the quake that reached his phone before the time seismic measurements show the quake reached Munroe’s city. Data point 2 – Social media moves faster than earthquakes.
So, after making a prediction, Munroe provides multiple data points showing that his prediction on social media behavior is correct.
This is just animated concept, but wouldn’t it be cool? My favorite part of the movie Minority Report was how people could control virtual screens in the air. (Thanks, 9to5mac!)
UPDATE: Wonkbook’s Dylan Matthews has a clear summary of the importance of the death of the Fairness Doctrine.
Last week I attended (and Tweeted about) some great sessions at the AEJMC meetings in St. Louis. This will be the first of a series of posts highlighting what I saw and heard.
This post looks at the award-winning creative projects from the Visual Communication Division. They include everything from a couple of civil rights documentary projects to teaching techniques for PR and media law classes.
Hi, everyone from AEJMC in Sunny St. Louis! If you are here and want to say hello, send me an e-mail to rhanson40@gmail.com. In the mean time, here’s a bit of what’s happening currently in media news:
Why do we care about how 3D movies are made?
Because movies that are shot in 3D from the beginning can look pretty good. Beyond the obvious example of Avatar, I would argue that the TRON remake was a gorgeous (if somewhat empty) 3D film, using 3D only in the computer world and keeping the “real” world in 2D.
I also thought the new Transformers movie looked great in 3D, even if it ran way too long.
But Thor looked absolutely terrible in 3D; it was dim and blurry on the edges if you weren’t sitting in the center of the theater. And unlike those previous three examples, it was a 3D conversion. Which is why I’m going to hold off seeing Captain America this weekend because the only screening I could get to would be a 3D one, and reports I’m seeing say that the Cap’n America 3D conversion is every bit as bad as the one for Thor. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see what Ridley Scott will do with his shot-in-3D Alien prequel Prometheus.
As a side note, noted movie critic Roger Ebert absolutely despises 3D movies of almost every sort. He’s presented his own thoughts on it and supported them with the views of respected people from the industry.
How do you feel about 3D movies? Will you skip seeing one because it’s in 3D? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
UPDATE: October 2014 – Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity was largely a conversion, but it had been planned and shot as a 3D movie from the very beginning. I’ve come to believe that it’s planning and cinematography that matter more than the actual technique used to create the 3D effects.
By the way, if you haven’t checked in and ‘liked’ the new Facebook page for Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, stop by and say ‘Hi!”
I’ve been holding off blogging for some time about the whole fuss over the scandal surrounding the British tabloid News of the World because I haven’t really been sure what to say about it.
On the one hand, the largest British newspaper has been involved in a scandal involving hacking a murdered girl’s phone, hacking the phones of British terrorism victims, payoffs to members of Scotland Yard, and improper connections to prominent British politicians. It’s gotten bad enough that former editors and reporters at the paper have been arrested or even sent to jail over the scandal. And there’s talk that News Corp. could be prosecuted in the US for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribing British officials. The scandal got bad enough that News Corp. shut down the embattled tabloid that had been publishing since 1843. (As a side note, NPR’s On The Media had a fascinating story recently on how easy it is to hack mobile phone voice mail.)
On the other hand, the fact that a sleezy London tabloid has been behaving sleazily is big news? Really? I mean…. News of the World’s sister paper The Sun runs pictures of naked women on its Page 3. (No, you don’t get a link . Find it for yourself if your curious.) Should we really act surprised that these News Corp. tabloids follow no normal set of acceptable journalistic conduct? It’s like Captain Renault in Casablanca proclaiming, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
The fact that the News of the World is also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has made this a huge story within the press. And there is a strong defense of this. After all, News Corp. is a major news organization and the third or fourth largest media corporation in the U.S. On the other hand, there are a a lot of people out there in the media business who really hate News Corporation’s newspapers and Fox News operations. As the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal (News Corp.’s most respected news outlet) put it so beautifully, “The Schadenfreude is so thick you can’t cut it with a chainsaw.” I’m not a fan of Mr. Murdoch’s, but I see the truth in what the editors at the WSJ are saying.
One thing to remember through all of this is Truth #4 – Nothing’s new: Everything that happens in the past will happen again. The behavior of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids is nothing new. Go back to the rise of the yellow press in New York City back in the late 1800s (about the time that the modern cannons of journalism were being established), and look at the newspaper wars between Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal. On The Media had a fascinating story about how the World and the Journal battled over their coverage of a murder case that involved dismemberment, a love triangle, and a newspaper publisher leasing the site a murder to keep the competition out.
And finally, if you are really ‘s in this story, go directly to the U.K. Guardian’s incredible in-depth coverage.
