If, in those first few minutes, you went to Twitter and did a simple search of quake-related terms, there was, as always, plenty of whispers and misinformation. A lot of the Christchurch mobile and internet network crashed, and the locals were too fucking busy making sure their fucking loved ones were okay to tweet their feelings about it.
So one of the very first tweets made about the Christchurch earthquake was from some numb-nuts well outside the stricken area, who had to get in first and make the stunningly thick and crass observation that the magnitude of the earthquake "wasn't that big", and Christchurch should harden up.
This tweet was written and sent out into the world at the same time that people were being slowly crushed to death in the CTV building, and as hundreds of people across the city were still to find out that their loved ones weren't coming home again.
That tweet was quickly swept away in a tide of digital history, lost beneath thousands and thousands of tweets full news and information about the quake, and pleas for help and good wishes. But some of us still remember that early tweet, and we hope the dude who wrote it still remembers. (and yeah, we're not naming him here, mainly because we've totally forgotten his name, but of course it was a fucking guy.)
We hope this quick tweeter has gone to bed every night in the six years since, thinking about how much he regrets making that post, and what a fucking tool he looked like for saying something so monumentally dumb. We hope he still cringes at the memory, and lives with the certainty that just because you can say something first, doesn't mean you fucking have to, and maybe you should hold off with your brilliant fucking observation, before you ram your foot into your mouth and suck on the heel.
He probably doesn't. He probably hasn't ever given it a second thought. But we can hope.
Twitter remains an invaluable news-gathering source, a useful method of direct communication, a haven for top pun-work, and a useful glimpse into the head of your favourite people.
But after six years, it's still also full of the kind of casual insensitivity of that first earthquake tweet, and this could be seen even today with the awful attack in Westminster, after which twitter was flooded with accusations, paranoia and sheer bullshit.
And that still makes Twitter the lowest form of media expression. Where goes Twitter, so goes society, but we don't have to fucking like it.
- Steve Lombard
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