How Sandy Slapped the Snark Out of Twitter

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters People congregate on Tuesday in front of a building in Manhattan that still has wireless Internet access.

Twitter is often a caldron of snark, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can morph during large events - users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.

As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under norma l circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity meltdown. If that New York cohort has a soul - insert your own joke here - you could see into it on Twitter.

And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Monday, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.

It is hard to data-mine the torrent â€" some estimates suggested there were three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy - but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via e-mail.

“I kept a close eye on the Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related - New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”

At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion that this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., just when we hunkered down in front of the big screen, the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a hand-cranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Tweets on my smartphone.

It was hard to resist. Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and re-Tweet, you feel as if you are adding something even though Mother Nature clearly has the upper hand. The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling that everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different than consuming mass media.

Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media - amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation - was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Hurricane Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don't feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.

At the same time, much of the seen-it-all and isn't-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream. (The message that earnestness was nascent and irony was on the run seemed widespread - the servers of Gawker, the hilarious and ill-mannered Manhattan snark machine, were drowned and the site went down. Still is, as a matter of fact.)

Many local television stations did an amazing job and the big cable-news outlets played large, but the template of the rain-and-wind-lashed correspondent shouting to a blow-dried anchor back in the studio has its limits. The local radio stations were nimble and careful, including WCBS, WNYC and WINS, but they were part of the story on occasion, with transformers going down and hurricane-induced glitches along the way.

Manhattan is the epicenter of a number of big blogs, including Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, but each had to pivot to Twitter, among other platforms, as their servers succumbed to encroaching waters. (At a conference last year, Andrew Fitzgerald of Twitter wondered about the utility of the platform if the end of the world arrived in the form of an alien attack. The people participating in the discussion pointed out that the lightweight infrastructure of Twitter and its durabilit y would probably make it very practical should end times draw nigh.)

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news Tweets from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also Tweets from plain old folks retailing very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as D.C. and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, wrote in a note: “To me the most basic act of journalism there can be is: ‘I'm there, you're not, let me t ell you about it.' Or: ‘I heard it, you didn't, let me tell you what Bloomberg said.' And the fact is Twitter is rife with such. That is why it is basic in a sprawling emergency.”

Twitter is a global platform, but it can be relentlessly and remarkably local should the occasion - or crisis - arise, as Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl, pointed out.

“Twitter was phenomenally useful microscopically - I was literally finding out information about how much flooding the Zone A block next to me was having, hour by hour - and macroscopically, too - I didn't even have to turn on the TV once the whole storm,” he wrote. He pointed out, as have many others, that there was abundant misinformation rendered in 140 characters as well, which reminded @kbalfe of another rapid-fire medium, actually. “Was a lot like cable news: indispensable … yet full of errors.”

In fact, some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentionally sti r panic. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed outed - “doxed” in the nomenclature of the Web - a person they said they said was the guy behind @comfortablysmug, an account that suggested that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been trapped by rising waters, that Con Edison was shutting down all of Manhattan and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

BuzzFeed identified the person behind those tweets as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year's Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th Congressional District. (Mr. Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign.) Because his Twitter feed was followed by a number of New York-based reporters, the misinformation spread quickly, although John Herrman, also writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread - then crushed - rumors at breakneck speed.”

Margaret Sulliv an, the public editor of The New York Times, said in a message on Twitter that whatever the quality of the feed at any given moment, it was riveting: “Impossible to tear one's eyes from, with occasional nuggets of helpfulness amid constant stream of flotsam and jetsam.”

The day after the storm, Twitter shook off much of the earnestness and reverted back to its snarky self, although the storm's death toll and the quest for resources made it a more serious village common than usual. In an e-mail, Peter Kafka of AllThings D, considered the value of Twitter in a big news event by running it through the way-back machine.

“Would it have been better during 9/11 if we had Twitter?” he wrote. “Plenty of bad and good info spread that day, by mouth, web and TV. My hunch is Twitter would do the same. The difference? Twitter allows my friends/like-minded people/people I like to feel a bit more connected. And that's a lot better than less connected.”

Calling it a “pop-up town square” for the affected area, @editorialiste said in a message on Twitter, it was “a great place to laugh, cry, argue, sympathize together.”

Kurt Andersen, radio host and writer, said that the combination of utility and sociability made Twitter a remarkable informative shelter during the storm.

“I've never liked or used the word ‘community' about people communicating online, but the Sandy conversations seemed worthy of the word, actually communal,” he wrote. “And given the circumstances, it really could've only happened online.”