Posts Tagged ‘Haiti’
Watch Haiti
By now you’re all likely familiar with the tremendous earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. The death toll is still unknown; in fact, the infrastructure of Haiti has been so substantially damaged it’s hard to know what is going on there.
This situation is identical to one just under two years ago, when a large earthquake struck the Sichuan region of China. Buildings and bridges collapsed; for several days no one could get in or out. An intrepid reporter from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation hiked into Sichuan carrying a satellite videophone and transmitted some of the first images back to the rest of the world.
The communications network has collapsed in Port-au-Prince; mobile phones, though ubiquitous, do not work. The cell towers have come down, and the wires which bring power to those towers have come down as well. Amazingly, there is some Internet service; individuals have been using Skype to communicate with the world beyond Haiti’s borders.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world collectively holds its breath and wonders how it can help. Requests have flown by in the conventional media – broadcast and print – for donations to the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, WorldVision, and so on. But, as was the case with Sichuan (or lately, any great disaster) the hyper-connections which tie is so closely to one another have become the major channel for information, for news, for sharing the burden of need. Twitter has more on-the-ground information about Haiti than the New York Times – so the Times creates a Twitter list of individuals in Haiti. Big media can reinforce and amplify our hyperconnectivity, creating a virtuous cycle which puts all of us into the loop. We are all witnesses. We can all reach out and help.