The first part of the video showed the people living in Japan at the time which showed real time footage from people in their homes where items were just falling and shaking from their places. Then you saw what the earthquake did to an office building the ceiling was falling and again items shaking and falling out of place. As I am here listening to music in my room my subwoofer seemed to be a great analogy as to what was happening. If I placed anything on my subwoofer it would fall right off, this is what seemed to happen with the earthquake hitting, everything just fell or broke. Next you could see the helicopter’s getting footage of the huge tsunami set for a course right for the shores of Japan. Then you could see the waves just destroying anything in the path. However, this only does any good if these people survive the earthquake and tsunami as in Japan’s situation.
I find the live footage from anyone on the ground at the time of the earthquake and tsunami to be very important to looking at how people react to crises. What do these people do when something strikes? Do they try to gather up emergency equipment they have in their homes like food, some sort of shelter, water, cell phones, any other communication mediums? There are a lot of socio-demographic things that could be answered from these videos such as who these people are, their location, how many people are with them.
It is no surprise that during the earthquake in Japan, communication spiked because people were trying to contact their loved ones and friends. I am not surprised that the Japan earthquake was the first major disaster of a developed nation in the age of social media with Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media site. I could have told you that Twitter and Facebook would be used the most by people after the earthquake with 38% using Twitter, and 22% used Facebook, and 16% used YouTube to post videos of what they were seeing all around them for an up close view of the events.
If you barely watched the video in the Angel folder watch it, it is a powerful video even if it might be a bit long just skip through it a bit just to see what people in Japan saw and experienced. And just think that this stuff didn't stop many people from using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Evan, I think thought your blog post this week was very well done. I wish that I could have seen this epic video that everyone has been talking about for some reason it just would not play on my computer. Regardless, the details that my classmates have provided have given me enough insight to realize in enough details to picture in my head what the actual video was like. I thought you made a very good comparison with the sub speaker in your room with the effects of the earthquake in Japan. You are definitely working on the creative side in this week’s blog my good man.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in the topic about the socio demographics and what happens when a crisis actually occurs. I think that depending on the person, they will do different things depending on their personal character traits and skills. For example a well-educated individual may look for supplies to aid in survival, while a small child may sit in the corner under a blanket and wait to be saved. My point is different people will do different things depending on the situation and I believe that would be an interesting case study to complete.
After watching this video at the end of your blog I was amazed at what I saw. I never thought things could get that bad during a natural disaster and it took this video to show me the panic on people’s faces and how they dealt with the situation. I was not surprised when I heard that social networks activity such as Facebook and Twitter spiked drastically after the disasters. Evan, I believe you did an awesome job explaining the information from this week’s class especially since you were not there. Overall, great job this week I look forward to reading your future posts.
It is also very interesting to me to see first hand how people react to a disaster. See what their actions are and see how sufficiently they move. Also it is very interesting to me because from a psychology stand-point you can actually kind of tell what the person is thinking just by observing their actions. It was cool to see how each individual person acted differently. Some people immediately got in their cars and tried to drive out of the disaster zone, and some tried to save family members. In the video that we watched in class we actually saw real live footage of a person carrying an elderly person out of harms way. The only problem was that these people may have misjudged how the water was moving and I pray that they made it out alive.
ReplyDeleteIt was also interesting to see how Japan’s citizens would respond to the attack. Would people go to twitter, facebook, and or YouTube in the time of the disaster to see if they could use it to their advantage? Experts did not really know because this was the first time that a disaster struck a well-developed and somewhat wealthy country. We would see realize that people will and did use them as a tool. This tells us that we as disaster responders need to realize that technology is a key part to disaster relief now a days and we need to step up to the plate and stop living in the past. We need to incorporate twitter into the immediate disaster relief plan as soon as possible because it has been proven to help save lives. I mean isn’t that the number one goal?
I think it was very interesting to see how people reacted during the crisis. Many people seemed to adhere to their drills and try and do what they were taught to and hope it worked out. Also in the videos I saw a lot of people trying to help one another which always warms the soul. I think the thing that bothered me most if the fact that people did not realize the severity of what was going on.
ReplyDeleteI mean I know earthquakes are a part of everyday life their and you can't let fear run you. But the number of people taking videos from the mos precarious of places really seemed odd to me. It didn't seem like they feared for their safety which is the bothersome part to me.
We watched a video of a man who filed right next to the ground in a park of the earth splitting apart. literally ripping apart and he or she just filmed it. Another video of a person in a house walking around filming the destruction and barely getting to safety with their child. One in an office building on one of the mid floors, filming one of his co-workers get hit with things falling from the tops of their desk. Another filming the ceiling falling out of a building. The cream of the crop to me was people from on a hill no more that 50 m away from the incoming tsunami filming it's path of destruction. They did not know how high the waves would get or how violent it would be.
It just didn't seem like everyone was being smart. For all of the good technology does it also can allow us to confuse our priorities. While the footage is incredible and breath taking it made me wonder if we are a a united people with an invincibility complex. We need to learn to be smarter and better prepare for these inevitabilities. We have all this wonderful technology and it is helping so much but for every good thing it does it allows us to do something stupid, like stand out in the middle of a tsunami and film it.
Overall very good and thought provoking post.
I was also very impressed with the video and the unique perspective of what exactly happens to people during the crisis and their reactions. As others have said, some of their reactions were creative, brave, and responsible, while others were not. A key example of this would be the people fleeing the swelling water level following the tsunami's impact. Rapidly rising water began nipping the heels of some individuals who began evacuating, but did so without necessary haste or caution.
ReplyDeleteSimply put, training will only get us so far and sometimes, as even the best trained and prepared of people make mistakes when under extreme pressure. Some deaths will not be preventable, but that doesn't take away from the importance of putting in the time, planning, and funding to conduct disaster drills and teach people what to do when a crisis occurs.