Assignment 10, eew27

While it is a much smaller group, I was involved in solving a similar problem as discussed in class/the reading. On 9/11, not only did my dad work near the towers, but he was also on a plane. More than half of my family lives in Europe, so it is hard enough for us to reach them, but with all the phone networks tied up it was extremely hard to communicate to them that my dad was ok. What ended up happening was someone started an email chain and included everyone they could think of in the family and updates would be sent through the email list once we found out he was on a different plane, and once he finally landed. On a bigger scale, my relatives in Europe also got the general news much slower than us since where I live we can actually see the skyline. Through email chains they were able to be updated faster than they otherwise would have. The phone line problem in this case is the same as the issue during the VT shooting as we talked about in class, and email provided a way to include everyone instead of calling every single family member separately.

This example of collective intelligent extends even further—since I live so close to NYC, my town quickly and collectively compiled a list of the people from town that had passed in order to create a monument in their honor. My town is quite small (~10,000 people, smaller than Cornell) so it really was like everyone knew everyone, in addition to many of the parents working in Manhattan. Since it was such a serious, personal matter it was nearly identical situation to what Vieweg writes: “The social arrangements of these distributed problem-solving efforts had several critical features that differentiated them from rumor-mongering, a more usual way of reporting on public involvement. The lists were never incorrect. Participants in the list-building activities self-policed, and they knew that adding a name to the list was a serious statement. Accuracy, verification, and gravitas ruled the interaction on these focal point sites…respect for the victims and their families demanded accuracy—established expectations for behavior about how information about victims was to be treated.” The easiest way to collect this information was online, and using technology made the process much quicker than it could have potentially been. Technology made the sharing of information much more efficient; a town official collected names and by doing so online everyone in town was effectively notified of our losses. This may not have been as easy if I did not live in such a tight-knit community.