The contrast between old media versus new technology can be seen clearly in how maps are portrayed of the Ebola epidemic. For example, the World Health Organization epitomizes the 'old' media with it's very static portrayal of the dynamic timeline of Ebola's spread. Instead of a video or motioned map, it just presents a bunch of PDF maps in a downloadable series. One can't really see the evolution easily on one simple map - one would really need two monitors and put all the maps side-by-side to see them well.
Time improves on that a bit with a time-line super-imposed on top of a globe with red circles representing where ebola cases have occurred. But really, the map and the line have no relation and don't explain anything about each other. So...useless. But nice try.
Once we get to the new media, we can see better maps at the openstreetsmap project for Ebola which is an excellent crowd-sourced website using NGO, WHO and news accounts to layer on the map Ebola's incidence. And the other excellent new media is healthmap ebola timeline, an excellent chronogram of case incidences and separate modeling graph predicting the number of cases. Rather than crowdsourcing the data, the healthmap product comes from Harvard Medical School and the Boston Children's Hospital who culled WHO data.
One thing that's still missing, however, seems to be first person accounts - self-reporting by patients - or second person accounting - reports from community leaders/activists/religious groups/ngo organizations - that can give a richer accounting of the incidence and geo-time relationships. As usual however, it's left to Ushahidi to fill in this gap. Ushahidi has for years been trying to allow self-reporting or near-self-reporting of incidents, whether in terms of conflict or, in this case, in terms of an epidemic. And you can see from their website that anyone can report an incident of Ebola - good, bad or ugly - through their android/iphone phone, through email or through the web.
It's important for big media to get used these new innovations. They really explain the world in a much more nuanced way. More importantly, governmental organizations (WHO, ministries of health) and NGOs really need better capacity to both report and respond to this new layer of mapping - such that they can really improve the work for the people they intend to help.
Comments