Yes! Or so says Evgeny Morozov of Foreign Policy magazine’s net.effect blog.
I don’t agree. Or, maybe more correctly, I think he misses the point. If Twitter reveals that people are acting like a dumb herd of swine (which I’m not sure is the case), then so much the better! That’s an interesting and potentially valuable thing to know!
Read more…
While doing some quick and dirty searching on Lexis-Nexis in an attempt to get a sense of the growth of interest in cyberwar and cyberterror over time, I came across an interesting quote from futurist Alvin Toffler of Future Shock and The Third Wave fame:
Cyberterrorism. This concept sees criminals of all types from mobsters to outlaw governments tapping into American computers, possibly bringing the country’s entire economy to a standstill.“We will see information terrorism,” he says while lunching near his home here. “They won’t need to blow up the World Trade Center. Instead, they’ll feed signals into computers from Libya or Tehran or Pyongyang and shut down the whole banking system if they want to. We know a former senior intelligence official who says, Give me $1 million and 20 people and I will shut down America. I could close down all the automated teller machines, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and most hospital and business computer sys-tems.’ ” [1] (Emphasis added)
I’ve created a quick and dirty Yahoo! Pipe that aggregates news from Google News and Yahoo! News about the ongoing swine flu outbreak and plots it on a map.
And here is a dynamic graph showing Twitters mentioning “swine flu,” “flu,” or “influenza.”
[Also posted at Transformation Tracker.]
Technorati Tags: swine flu, flu, influenza
Hector Postigo at Temple University