Swine flu! World Health Organization at alert level 4! Markets
rocked by sell-offs! Howie Mandel was right! Never shake hands! Bathe in Purell!
See if you can borrow a face mask from Michael Jackson! Or hold your breath whenever you are near a
ham sandwich! Armies of
pigs in uniform marching on Washington! Orwell was right: the animals have turned on us, become more dangerous
than us! Four legs bad, two legs good! Head for the hills!
Once again, the media is reacting to a potential threat with
its usual calm, responsibly recognizing that sensational coverage of diseases
can have far worse consequences than the diseases themselves. Or not.
Remember SARS? Fewer people died of SARS than choked to
death in the United States on small objects that year. But estimates of global economic losses
exceeded $40 billion. Back then, I wrote an article called "The Buzz
Bites Back" for the Washington Post
about this phenomenon dubbing it an "infodemic." And it was clear at the time that the
progress of the information revolution was amplifying the impact of these
information epidemics and accelerating their spread. Yet, still hysteria reigns again.
This is not to say that the WHO response has not been appropriate. It has. It is not to say that there isn't a
vital public health role to be played by the media. It is critical that the
media offer information about symptoms, precautions, and the spread of potential
epidemics. But whereas health officials
practice how to manage these crises, not only do the vast majority of media
never think such matters through, newer "viral" media are all emotion all the
time.
One particularly fascinating element of the infodemic
phenomenon is that the spread of rumors or news throughout society looks
exactly like the spread of diseases; they are communicated in the same ways and
patterns. (You'll note that in both the SARS case and the current instance, it
was the infection of Americans that kicked mainstream media into gear and
elevated the story into a code-one frenzy.)
The nature of the spread of such infodemics also, by the
way, offers useful tools to epidemiologists trying to use modern media to
identify potential medical risks and contain them. I know this was discussed in the Net Effects
blog here at FP the other day and I would just like to offer one anecdotal
insight that suggests to me that perhaps the skepticism about the value of
using such tools expressed in the post has been overtaken by events. Back in
the months before the SARS outbreak became public, I ran a company called
Intellibridge which tracked "open source" intelligence for a variety of
clients. In other words, we looked at what was available on the Net in many
languages to see what it might offer government or business clients in the way
of insights.
One of our analysts spotted a small item in a newspaper in
Guangdong province stating roughly that people should not panic due to rumors
of an outbreak of a disease. When the
Chinese government says do not panic, our analysts were trained to be skeptical
and indeed, when we dug into the issue we found that word was spreading
throughout southern China, largely by means of cell phone messaging, concerning
this new outbreak of disease. In fact, we
became so concerned that we called the Center for Disease Control...who proceeded
to brush us off saying that they did not accept information of this source from
the public. Ten weeks or so later the World Health Organization acknowledged
the outbreak of the disease.
The punch line: modern information technologies offer
important tools for both containing and amplifying threats such as those posed
by the global spread of epidemics. Considerable work remains to be done however, in understanding how to
use these tools and to limit their abuse...and new media like Twitter and social
networking sites do not make this task any easier. (Although figuring out how to manage this in
the context of a free society is an especially important challenge for
governments worldwide, arguably much more important than popular media-policy
intersections like "public diplomacy.")
ANWAR AMRO/AFP/Getty Images
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