These days, it seems as if I cannot go a day without reading another story or news article about the power of social media. While many of us benefit from the conveniences that the Twitters and WordPresses of the world bring us, I feel that sometimes we underestimate the ability of social media to work on a greater scale than just keeping up with Facebook pokes and the hottest new YouTube videos.
Case in point: In a recent online article from Wired, one if its writers, Evan Ratliff, decides to try an experiment to test the power of today’s interconnected digital world. His challenge to the online masses? He would disappear from his existing life and try to vanish from August 15th to September 15th, and anybody who could find him during that period of time would receive a $5,000 prize. Ratliff explains the thinking behind this unusual story:
“The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another… What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?”
Professional detectives and random Joes were able to track Ratliff through credit card records, FedEx tracking numbers, IP addresses, Twitter accounts, although Ratliff also had his own defenses, both traditional and high-tech. What was the result? Click here for the result of this digital Where’s Waldo, where people leverage social media’s ability for information discovery.
And a heartwarming example for the holiday season: A baby girl abandoned on the doorstep of a townhouse in Fairfax, Virginia some twenty years ago just reconnected with her then-15-year-old rescuers to give them her thanks. As the Washington Post explains, the abandoned girl, now a junior in college, began looking for her rescuers when she was in high school, but given that there are so many repetitions of the same name, she was unable to figure out which one to message about her thanks. One day, she finds that one rescuer (Chris) is a Facebook friend of another rescuer’s (Emily), and then she knew. Chris’ response summarized the ending well: “It’s the best Christmas present I have ever gotten.” Awesome!
Edit: A friend from Google, Bing Chen, just sent me a link about a recent United Nations report on the role of information and social networks in emergencies and conflicts. Great read.
