The 'global village' unites in adversity

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta, vmahmud@yahoo.com

The shock of the tragic loss of life in the Southeast Asian region from the Dec. 26 tsunami continues to reverberate around the world.

People from all walks of life have dug deep into their pockets to donate money and equipment for the ravaged areas, as have major corporations.

Apple Computer, for the first few weeks, dedicated its entire home page to the calamity, urging visitors to donate to the various charities linked to its website.

Amazon.com collected pledges on behalf of the American Red Cross and Australia's three main TV networks, along with most of the country's radio stations, held a live concert telethon last Saturday to garner more aid.

Coverage of the rogue wave has filled the airwaves and the Internet, but never more so as shown by the bloggers, or people who write personal online diaries. Known as blogs, or web logs, these homemade websites offered first-hand accounts and even photos of the tsunami.

Wiz Bang (www.wizbangblog.com/archives/004664.php) and Cheese and Crackers (www.jlgolson.blogspot.com) are just a few of this elite writers community that have managed to galvanize the world to generously donate as well as try to contact missing loved ones.

Cheese and Crackers even has a collection of links to amateur movie footage of the tsunami from Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka. This allows the world to see and study an event that has never been recorded on film.

The video reveals not a gigantic wall of water that we usually see in Hollywood films but a series of huge waves that become stronger and stronger, flooding the mainland.

More evidence of the devastation can be seen on the website of satellite imagery company Digital Globe (www.digitalglobe.com), which has before-and-after pictures of Banda Aceh. With all of this data, mankind should be able to prevent such catastrophes from happening again.

There have been calls for a tsunami early warning system, which apparently is lacking in some countries due to costs and cumbersome bureaucracy. In fact, the Bangkok Post reported that the head of the Thai Meteorological Department was suspended for failing to issue an emergency alert to save vacationers in southern Thailand.

It has been said that previous warnings of such a calamity years ago had angered the local tourism industry there.

However, as the Bangkok Post noted, there is no infrastructure or plan for a massive controlled evacuation. What do they do? Where do they go? Who controls the flow of the masses?

Popular IT commentator Robert X. Cringely (www.pbs.org/cringely) noted last week that we do not really need to wait for governments to get their act together to create a tsunami warning system. With the Internet and digital convergence, regular people and communities living by the sea should be able to prepare their own action plans.

Data from national or international seismic observatories, as well as non-governmental agencies such as the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (www.ctbto.org) could be aggregated and dispatched to anyone who signs up.

An alert via e-mail or even Short Messaging Systems (SMS) would prompt those near the earthquake zone to take steps. However, this would require the data from these organizations to be freely available.

Back in the old days before public services such as the police, fire department and city government, communities would work together in a close neighborly fashion.

Now, with the advent of the Internet, templates for a community disaster action plan can be drafted by volunteers online, with contributions and suggestions from the whole world to be implemented locally.

This open-sourced plan of action will continue to evolve as more and more information is gathered and analyzed.

As bloggers today are amateur journalists, today's technology has democratized information so that anyone can be given accurate data to be acted on, making them amateur seismologists, community leaders or survival experts.

Reliance on a single conduit of information is a recipe for disappointment since it represents a single point of failure for an action plan. Communication should go both ways, with people listening to the government and vice versa.

The era of "need to know" information can no longer apply in a world that continues to evolve technologically. Everyone has the power to make changes, but they must receive the best data taken in context to make the correct decision.

This is where the global village can help.