The Blog of Burgher Jon

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I posted yesterday about the book Super Freakenomics, which I just finished reading.  In a chapter on “unbelievable stories of apathy and altruism” the authors discuss one of the hallmark cases of apathy, the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.  For those who are unfamiliar with the murder, she was killed and raped in 2 separate attacks.  Both of the attacks happened (to at least some degree) in plain sight of an apartment building across the street.  The original NYT article reported that there were 38 witnesses, though it seems that may have been an exaggeration.  There is some argument over whether any of the witnesses called the police, but it’s known none of them left the building to help her.

As I was reading this section of the book, the Burghosphere and Twitsburgh were, actively trying to get aid to two Burghers trapped in Haiti with the orphans from the orphanage they run (as they still are, if you know of anyone in Port au Prince that might be able to help STOP READING THIS AND CLICK THAT LINK!).  It goes without saying that the orphans almost certainly wouldn’t have survived this mess 50, 25 or probably even 5 years ago and that the girls would have been a maybe at best.  This startling and encouraging use of the information super highway (particularly the Twitter and Blogging lanes) got me to wondering what would have happened 36 years ago if they had the same media/social networking that we have today?  After all, Twitter is supposed to be a “real time” source of information, right?

There are two scenarios to explore how it might have played out differently.  Frankly, niether of them are good.  As a technologist, I see that as leaving room for improvement within the world of social networking.  I’m excited for a time when I run these scenarios in my head and they both end up with a safe Kitty Genovese.

1. If Kitty had Twitter.  I think this would have mattered very little.  The cell phone might have helped as it seems possible that the neighbors didn’t adequately explain the urgency of the situation to the police.  Putting aside the cell phone for a moment, let’s say it was just a Twitter device.  Her tweets surely would have been found the next day by CNN or worse, gawker.  They surely would not be noticed by the police until they appeared in a newspaper article or tv news story. Implicit Technology Limitations: Twitter, though it is heralded as “real time” suffers from such a volume of messages that the really important ones don’t weasel their way to the top of the stack fast enough.  Additionally, while I could see a police force looking to a twitter account for lead or evidence, there is no way for any sort of emergency organization to understand the urgency or even read the message.
2. If the neighbors had Twitter.  I’m wondering if this might not have made things worse.  When something happens in front of us we have a natural human instinct to either find out what happened or tell someone about it.  What if Twitter satisfied that human need and everyone went back to sleep (the murder was at 3am)?  Alternatively, there is some chance it would have improved the situation.  Perhaps one of the neighbors who tweeted what he had just seen would have gotten a call from his mother saying, “You idiot, go check on her.”  However, that seems like a stretch. Implicit Technology Limitations: This one is a technical limitation that dates back to the invention of writing; communicating without talking to someone is not the same as communicating with them person to person (or at least by telephone).  If you can communicate without speaking to someone, you might choose that route.  If you do, the quality of communication is deteriorated.