How Twitter & The Tohoku Quake Changed The Way We Look at Places

Imagine a Tokyo resident on the morning of March 11, 2011, using her iPhone as she waits for the subway on the way to work. She navigates overlapping, intertwining spaces: the station of a specific rail line, a queue of passengers waiting to board, the language space of multilingual signs, the political space of a Tokyo ward, of Japan; plus the literal underground — but also spaces of the internet, of Twitter interactions, Mixi diaries, and SMS exchanges; of iOS and the network infrastructure of SoftBank. She probably isn’t making voice calls on her mobile because that’s considered a little rude in the communal space of the subway platform, but she could.

That evening, when she tries to return home, her places have been dramatically rearranged. Her subway station is closed. So are all of the others in easy walking distance. Though Tokyo is far enough from the earthquake’s epicenter that structural damage is relatively minimal, the world’s largest metropolitan rail system is out of commission. Her home in Chiba, normally a forty minute ride away, is now far, far away. Long queues of exhausted people wait for taxis and she doesn’t know how to walk home. Worse, ever since the earthquake she’s been trying to call her sister, her brother, her best friend. She can’t get through. She tries again to call emergency services to check on her parents. She can’t get through. She can, however, still access the internet. As a device, her phone is functioning perfectly, though the battery is a little low now, and parts of the mobile network remain solid. She can still use Mixi. She can still tweet. Like many of her friends, she has chosen not to link her Twitter account with her personal identity in order to preserve a degree of anonymity. This practice makes finding loved ones outside of her normal Twitter circle difficult. Still, she is glued to Twitter, searching for more information. After more than two hours in the unmoving queue, a stranger a few blocks away tweets that he is driving toward Chiba and has a seat left in his car. She arranges to meet him and heads home. 

The triple disaster reconfigured geography and politics in Japan. Social media use during the disaster reconfigured communication technologies.

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