Disseminating Pandemics

In keeping with the technological aspect of this blog, I thought it would be interesting to consider the role of new media in the current concern about swine flu. More specifically, CNN reports the controversy brewing on Twitter about the possibility of pandemic. John D. Sutter notes that "Some observers say Twitter -- a micro-blogging site where users post 140-character messages -- has become a hotbed of unnecessary hype and misinformation about the outbreak, which is thought to have claimed more than 100 lives in Mexico." This observation of course points to the difficulty of a medium with so much rhetorical and generic flexibility: while on the one hand blogs, micro blogs, and social networks are praised for their user-generated content and their (supposed) freedom from the control of corporate media empires, on the other hand, they force us to question the reliability of the information we find--an issue that teachers and professors have been struggling with for years now.

Personally, I'm always going to come down on the side of the little guy, even at the expense some degree of information credibility. However, the article points to what may be an even larger issue:

"This is a good example of why [Twitter is] headed in that wrong direction, because it's just propagating fear amongst people as opposed to seeking actual solutions or key information," said Brennon Slattery, a contributing writer for PC World.

Lest Brennon Slattery forget, this is the same charge that Michael Moore leveled against local news programming in Bowling for Columbine and that John Stewart regularly uses to lampoon 24-hour cable news networks. This points to the possibility that perhaps we should worry less about pointing the finger at Twitter--or any other single media outlet--in particular. One could, for example, just as easily point to the uncritical circulation of Google's H1N1 map on Facebook and other social networks as contributing to the paranoia. Instead we should draw attention to the very discourse of paranoia that surrounds media accounts of the possibility of pandemic, whether generated by average users or media conglomerates. Although I don't necessarily want to treat the form/medium as separate from the message, since they do inform one another, I think that attending to the messages themselves might provide ways for us to maintain a productively critical eye on the ways these media inflect our understanding of culture and current events.