A Moderate Earthquake, A Media Storm

Reaction to the June 23 tremors in Canada and the U.S. demonstrated how new media have shaken up the news cycle.

It’s a funny thing when you study the media, and one day you find yourself the subject of media attention. When an earthquake hit Ottawa on June 23, I grabbed my Canon camera and recorded the water bouncing around in my two aquariums. The resulting 30-second video does not quite convey the full effect of a 5.0 Richter-scale quake on the 10th floor of a 30-year-old apartment building (which was quite terrifying), but I uploaded it to YouTube anyway.

The result was almost immediate. Within minutes, the video garnered hundreds of views. People across the country and even from across the border were posting comments on the video all day. Then television stations started to pick up the video, and media started calling for interviews. My fish tanks had gone viral.

As soon as the earth stopped shaking, Facebook updates started rolling in from my students and friends, all reporting on their experience and sharing photographs of the damage. My favorite comment came from my friend Simon: “all safe and sound, kids got an unexpected wave pool in the neighbor’s pool.” Through the internet, I watched people connecting to each other in real time as husband and wives, friends and family used Facebook to shout out to each other and say, “We’re OK.”

The phone rang, and a friend in a nearby government office tower told me the building jumped an inch and the employees were being evacuated. I called my wife and parents. The phones and the internet worked (although some people reported cell phone outages). Ironically, I couldn’t get into the federal government’s Earthquakes Canada website until hours after the tremors. By late afternoon, a Wikipedia page was documenting the quake. As the day wore on, more amateur video clips began to show up on television.

The earth moved and in its own way told us that we are all connected. It trembled and we shook. But we also responded with a unique and unifying set of communication tools. Amateur videographers became freelance journalists who supplied the aging broadcast television industry with moving images of the moving earth. Digital cameras snapped images of the damage and these too were uploaded to the internet and integrated into commercial news sites nationwide. Individuals related their experience via Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube. The event was duly documented and entered into the pages of history via Wikipedia.

This series of events reveals how the news cycle is changing. One of the first things people did following the quake was to go to YouTube in search of a video account of the incident. Apparently, one of the first things the gatekeepers of commercial media did was also to hit up YouTube in search of footage. Then we-who-were-formerly-known-as-the-audience turned to the television and, as many related to me, saw the very same footage we had watched on YouTube.

This is the new new-media cycle: amateurs capture the event, commercial media appropriate their material, and we watch it again on two screens – computer monitors and television (and for some, smart phones). After the earthquake, very little by way of informational value was in fact added to the flow of news reaching my fellow Facebookers via the commercial news system. The details, fact-checking, and eye witness reports were already available to the online audience and were being furiously exchanged.

The “middle man” – the commercial media – clearly has a fragile position in this new cycle. Yet despite its dependency on amateur photographers and videographers, it grows more hostile towards our own fair rights and artistic appropriations of their intellectual property. When the earthquake happened, a shared experience was gifted to the internet and imported into commercial media – but God and lawyers help you if you take it upon yourself to “import” commercial media elsewhere on the internet.

I don’t mind the media using my content – I just wish my interview about the quake video on CBC Connect with Mark Kelley had not been pre-empted by a visit to the G20 “fake lake.” And I wish my camera had captured an image of my book, Watching YouTube, instead of YouTube for Dummies.

Postscript: The day after the quake my video had a total of 106,600 views and 470 comments. I read every one of the comments and was left in awe of the appalling literacy of the YouTube generation.