Media After 3.11 | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)

2011.06.20

Let's look back at the various issues that emerged with the information and communication infrastructure, such as TV and mobile phones, which we used daily without a second thought, when Japanese society faced the unprecedented crisis of a major earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant accident.

On the day of 3.11, I was at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) to participate as a panelist in a panel discussion at the KAKENHI Information Explosion IT Infrastructure results presentation meeting when the disaster struck. I was watching a demo session on the second floor. The shaking was so intense that the demonstrators scrambled to hold onto large displays and PC monitors to keep them from falling over. By the organizers' decision, the demos, technical sessions, and panel discussions were all canceled, and many participants started for home.

Participants from the Tokyo suburbs were unable to return home because all JR, private railway, and subway lines had suspended service, so they waited at the NII venue for trains to resume. We were able to quickly decide not to go home because NII provided us with a place to take shelter and we had confirmed that all our family members were safe. On the other hand, many people walked home in silence, some for over 20 km. I hear that many had no choice but to return home because they couldn't contact their families or get necessary information.

Immediately after such a major earthquake, not only were transportation systems paralyzed, but outgoing call restrictions were placed on landlines and mobile phones, leaving many people unable to contact their families directly. It was reported that, according to NTT Docomo, traffic after the earthquake was about 50 times higher than normal, forcing them to impose 90% outgoing call restrictions even in central Tokyo. The internet, on the other hand, due to its nature as a packet-switched network, allowed people to communicate as usual via email. It also enabled them to check real-time, constantly changing information on public transport congestion and train service status via tweets on Twitter.

As for the challenges, on the infrastructure side, many base stations for conventional landline and mobile communication networks in the Tohoku region were destroyed. Furthermore, outgoing call restrictions rendered the call function almost unusable, exposing vulnerabilities to earthquakes and tsunamis. Instead of the existing call restrictions, a smarter congestion control should have been implemented, even if it meant lowering call quality. Other issues also became apparent with mobile phones, such as false detections in the Emergency Earthquake Early Warning system, battery problems, and the need for ad-hoc communication functions that do not rely on base stations. Regarding media usage, while the effectiveness of information from new, highly real-time social media like Twitter was confirmed, issues also emerged concerning the slow speed and questionable credibility of information disseminated via the simultaneous broadcast method of conventional public broadcasting.

Howard Rheingold wrote a book about smart mobs in 2002, but this time, I believe that new social media like Twitter, rather than mobile phones, spread rapidly throughout Japan, accelerating the trend of crowdsourcing. Although posts are limited to 140 characters, this very limitation confirmed its characteristics as a medium that can scale in emergencies and maintain real-time capabilities. It also proved to be a medium resistant to misinformation through official tweets and retweets, and it can be said to have instantly established its position as a useful medium in times of disaster.

p.s.

As part of our power-saving project, the visualization of the campus's electricity consumption, which we built in collaboration with our lab's sensor team and the staff of the main building's central monitoring room, is in trial operation as shown here. (I believe the official version will be released soon, so please make use of it.)

(Published: 2011/06/20)