Virginia Tech tragedy: new media but old public safety communications

Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media Blog and Liz Gannes at GigaOm do a terrific job of describing the impact of new media forces on the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy - a critical mass of people now have production tools (e.g. digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones) and mass production distribution (e.g. the Internet and social networks).  This put us all at the front lines almost instantly.  There are many ramifications of this, and Dan and Liz describe them very well.

The driving force behind new media is the communications revolution - Internet replacing broadcast TV/radio/newspaper as the pipe; many-to-many, interactive communications applications built on top of that virtually infinite diameter pipe - email, IM, blogs, VoIP, wikis, social networks, photo/video sharing, etc.   But this revolution hasn't yet reached many critical areas.

This tragedy reinforced that communications in disaster situations is one of those areas.  Tom Evslin has blogged about how the same driving force behind the communications revolution and new media can and should be used in public safety communications.  Consider if Virginia Tech had campus-wide WiFi and replaced the student's dorm phones with wireless WiFi devices.  In an emergency, designated people have the ability to trigger multi-media messages/updates that can be broadcast/multicast to all of those devices, and each of the receiving devices can forward that same update peer-to-peer to other devices in the area.  You don't need to rely on trying to place a cell phone call through an overloaded tower, and a student could talk to someone at the same time that he's reading text message updates on the device.

That's a simple description - an actual solution would more complex - and you could also envision scenarios (though they'd require cooperation from mobile phone carriers) in which messages like this could be sent to all mobile/IP devices in a given area, not just ones controlled by a certain entity.  But the bottom line is there are many ways that we can leverage IP, VoIP, GPS/IP triangulation and P2P technology for such solutions.  In the case of Virginia Tech, as well as New Orleans recently, better and more real-time communication within the campus potentially would have saved many lives.  Hopefully, when we consider and learn from these tragedies, we'll not only marvel at what the communications revolution has done for new media, but consider what it could and should do to help prevent or limit the tragedies as well.