News

After the lights went out in the middle of Toronto, leaving a cool 100,000-odd people without power for almost 24 hours in the dead of winter, the mayor had a suggestion: buy battery-powered radios.

That preparedness advice wasn't without merit. There was one report of the ill-equipped being forced to use an iPhone as a flashlight. (In my defence, the light it casts is more colourful than your average flashlight's.) But a good many of the afflicted discovered that, as battery-powered gadgets go, smart phone were even more useful than radios. Within minutes of the power going out, people with mobile Web access had hopped online and were comparing notes. Reports pinging in from around the city described the extent of the outage, directing people toward neighbourhoods (and pubs) that still had power.

When phone batteries ran low, some people plugged their phones into their laptops and powered them that way. The Net-connected quickly found out that power wouldn't be back any time soon. Meanwhile, disconnected neighbours waited hours in the dark for news.

Behold: the Net-connected calamity.

Everyone knows that new media and disasters go together like apes and ugly. New media are undeniably useful in handling crises, even if the whiff of self-congratulation that follows can be pungent. It's a chance for the Web to flex its muscles and show off its latest tricks for disseminating information. When something tumultuous goes down in well-wired parts of the world, the Web positively lights up with instant feedback from the areas affected. And it's hard not to notice that the Web hasn't just given us a new means of passing notes; it's given us a new nervous system.

Citizen journalism always shines in times of peril, although the carrier keeps changing. Back in the summer of 2005, the subway bombings in London, England, turned people on to the power of Wikipedia-style sites as a means of aggregating news on the fly. The reaction to the Virginia Tech killings in 2007 played out on Facebook and MySpace. And news of the attacks in Mumbai two months ago was relayed more or less live over Twitter.

Every iteration seems to bring watchers closer to the action, providing not just blanket coverage but a grainy detail and emotional intimacy that TV cameras could never match. This is the benefit of getting coverage from hundreds – or even thousands – of perspectives at once. And the best way to get those thousands of perspectives is to hit the world in a Web-connected nerve centre.

Case in point: On the same day that the lights went out in Toronto, a US Airways Airbus ingested an unfortunate flock of geese and made an emergency aquatic landing in New York. Some of the most startling images of that incident came not from helicopter news-crews, but from passengers on nearby ferries that rushed to the scene. Those passengers had camera-phones, and those camera-phones connect to sites like Twitter, so close-ups of survivors huddled on the plane's wet wings were immediately distributed across the Web.

New York, like Toronto and every other dense urban area in the developed world, is full of overgadgeted people, jostling together and wirelessly linked. When something goes awry, people who hooked up to the Internet start acting as a little nerve endings, pinging signals of distress in the form of text, photos and videos. Connect enough nerve endings together, and it becomes possible to assemble the big picture very quickly.

It's a neat effect, but every time we go through a Net-connected calamity, it's difficult not to notice the unspoken caveat. Should you whack yourself with a hammer, it hurts more if you hit someplace with a lot of nerve endings. Places like Toronto, New York, Virginia and London have something in common, and it's not an abundance of suffering. They all have rich, wired, English-speaking populations with the right tools to connect them. These places are packed with nerves.

Other places aren't. The world, in case you needed reminding, is full of unpleasantness, and in theory, the Web should democratize that misery. Yet social media manage to immerse us in minute details of a jetliner that touches down on the Hudson River or a chilly night in Toronto, while offered slim coverage of Darfur and the Congo.

Why? You could say that, to date, the nerve endings have been sparse in those parts of the world. The Internet reaches around the globe, but it's not always able to handle high-speed data the way it can here. Things are changing, though. Mobile-phone technology is advancing, and clever services like Twitter are promoting new ways to use them. Soon, a truly global nervous system will take shape.

And then, I think, there'll be a reckoning. It's always been easy to blame the media for preferring to cover a local hot-dog roast rather than a distant war. But when distant nerves fire off pain signals that can reach anywhere, there will be no excuse for looking away. We're going to discover just how good we are at ignoring the throbbing.