Quake a virtual reality

News travelled quickly when the big earthquake hit last weekend. But how it travelled was vastly different to major emergencies of the past. PHILIP MATTHEWS reports.

One of the great moments in the legendary anti- Springbok tour documentary Patu! comes as a group of protesters occupies a rainy highway in central Wellington.

The leader of the group has paused and is quietly leaning over his transistor radio. Some others huddle around. There is important news: protesters have stopped the test in Hamilton.

That was less than 30 years ago, but such a quaint scene would be unimaginable now. Who waits for radio news? These days, the protesters would be texting and tweeting each other, updating their Facebook status as they march, and uploading YouTube clips. And we would all be better informed for it.

Last weekend's Canterbury earthquake and its prolonged aftershocks showed just how the media landscape has changed. Everyone is in the news business now. Everyone is producing, circulating and consuming.

Even the Prime Minister got news of the quake by text message, from his sister in Sumner.

The day after the quake, John Key appeared on TV One's Q + A programme and said: "The first word [of the text] actually rhymed with truck, but I won't bother saying it on TV, and then the rest of it carried on from there.

"When I rang her on the phone, she said it wasn't like those earthquakes we had when we were kids and the glass rattled off the end of the dining room table. This was a major."

Interviewer Paul Holmes went on: "So the word that rhymed with truck gave you an idea of the seriousness of this earthquake that was happening in Christchurch?"

Key: "Well, she doesn't normally text me at 4.41 in the morning."

In Connecticut, on the eastern seaboard of the United States, expatriate book reviewer and blogger Jolisa Gracewood was "about to hit 'publish' on a frivolous blog post when the lateral fault under Christchurch groaned into life".

Three hours later, she had thrown out the frivolous and replaced it with a nicely turned personal essay in which she reminisced about earthquake drills in the Hutt Valley, real shakes in Tokyo and warnings from a geology student at the University of Canterbury 20 years ago to forget about Wellington as the big one would hit Christchurch - who believed him?

When it was 4.35am for us, it was just after lunch on the day before for Gracewood. She probably knew more than we did, and she wasn't getting it from American TV or radio, but from Twitter, as she wrote on her Busytown blog at the Public Address site.

"Watching the news roll in, via a flock of tremulous tweets, was uncanny. Once again, bite-sized reports from wired citizens were running around the world before the mainstream media had even got its boots on."

Scroll down through Twitter accounts and you can see exactly what people were saying to the wider world, in real time. From Christchurch at 4.36am on that Saturday: "Holy crap. This is the big one! Giant earthquake!" The same author, 40 minutes later: "Please let me know if I need to run from a tsunami!" Those rampant exclamation marks were entirely warranted.

Some kept a sense of humour: "Fish have made a bid for freedom, tank has a huge hole."

This was good too: "The one day I don't charge my phone, we lose all power. F... you Murphy and your laws!"

In the US, Gracewood was reading comments like these, and there was her first tweet in response: "Oh, Chch. What a shock. Please please be all right."

In Christchurch, a Twitter user named Visionary Media had photos online within an hour. The city was still dark and empty. An image went up of a ruined building - it used to have two storeys, the caption said - quickly followed by comments from around the world, including one from the broadcaster MSNBC asking to use the picture in its own coverage.

Those who were less intrepid were still in the dark in every sense. Even when Gracewood's rewritten blog went online three hours after the quake, only a few in Christchurch were able to read it.

At home, we waited through the aftershocks and heard a text ping on the mobile. Friends and relatives group-texted across Christchurch, reassuring each other. Everyone was in one piece. Some had power. Most did not.

But it was a few hours before we texted further, to Auckland and Wellington, concerned that Christchurch might just have been at the tail end of a much bigger quake elsewhere. If Wellington had been flattened, who needed to hear from us?

Some even further afield than Gracewood knew more than we did. Within an hour of the first quake, an internet user in Romania had created a Wikipedia page for the Canterbury earthquake. Over the following minutes and hours, contributions came in from Italy, Chile, Dunedin and elsewhere. People who had never met in real space were collaborating in the internet's virtual space.

The Wikipedia users debated what to call the page. The New Zealand earthquake was thought too grandiose. The Christchurch earthquake was too narrow. They settled on the 2010 Canterbury earthquake. Over the following days, they added information, photos and footnotes, building up a solid, useful account. Rumours were checked out - is it true Westfield Riccarton's ceiling caved in? - and discarded.

You hear a lot of talk about how virtual communities are replacing or augmenting physical communities. The earthquake shows how that worked, with the bonds in both kinds of communities strengthened.

On Public Address, a discussion opened up under Gracewood's blog, and as different parts of Christchurch got their power back, they checked in and shared stories ("Just a bit of breakage in the kitchen"). Here was news from Sockburn and St Albans, St Martins and Richmond. You learnt how heartbreakingly bad things were in Avonside.

Media tips were swapped. Stuff and Radio New Zealand were recommended. It was widely agreed that TV One was more on to it than TV3. People uploaded photos to Flickr and a site called Crashbang. Some were news photos by professionals. Some were taken on mobile phones in poor light. There were photos of silt, cracks and bricks.

On the Saturday afternoon of the quake, messages like "Quite a lot of shops on Barbadoes and Cranford streets are in states of collapse" and "Fire in the central city now and no water" appeared. Someone helpfully provided a link to the Earthquake Commission's online claims service.

Everyone was a journalist and everyone was a media critic. Who wasn't sick of the sight of that ruined building on the corner of Manchester and Worcester streets that television used as its disaster backdrop before it found crumbling shopfronts in Victoria St?

As the week ground on, out-of- towners went on Twitter to inquire about the status of their favourite Christchurch spots. More than a few wondered about Whisky Galore in Colombo St. Broadcaster and eccentric Marcus Lush worried about the statue of Robert Falcon Scott.

Art critic Hamish Keith had concerns about Christchurch Art Gallery's famous glass facade.

Miraculously, they survived.

At our place, we were getting Facebook messages from Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, Sydney and even Switzerland. Were we OK? The checking-in was nearly all virtual and mobile.

Auckland blogger Craig Ranapia noted that it took only a matter of hours to find out that his Canterbury friends and relatives were fine. After the Edgecumbe quake of 1987, it was five days before he heard from his parents.

We tend to forget what those times were like.

By Sunday, with everyone accounted for, talk turned to the alarming inappropriateness of the Herald on Sunday's front page, the one that screamed "Doomsday".

"What if there had been loss of life?" someone asked. "Would they have upgraded it to 'Super Dooper Doomsday'?"

News that schools were closed went around on Twitter and by text on the Sunday afternoon.

By Monday, comments like this were suggestive of some kind of normality returning: "The rubbish trucks came round this morning just as they usually would. What you're seeing on TV is the absolute worst. There are a few suburbs where you could walk around and see no sign it had happened." Everyone became an earthquake expert, making educated guesses about the size of the aftershocks. Was that a 5? No, it felt like a 4.

Then the jokes started to circulate. The one about 90 per cent of Christchurch children coming from broken homes. The one about the destroyed bagel shop proving the earthquake wasn't a CIA conspiracy.

You could follow waves in the collective mood. The initial shock on the Saturday. Relief by Sunday as things didn't seem so bad, as we swapped links to an article explaining why Christchurch was not Haiti. But on Monday, a setback: more fear after the aftershocks. Then the depression and stress. By Wednesday, the discussions were about who was escaping where - Auckland, Dunedin, Timaru.

And the internet kept on proving its usefulness. University students set up a Facebook page that ran as a virtual volunteer station.

Paul Nicholls, of the University of Canterbury, designed an animated quake map (christchurchquakemap.co.nz) that showed the size and location of the first quake and the many aftershocks. Within hours it was viewed by thousands.

Shut out of most media coverage, Christchurch Labour MPs used Labour's Red Alert blog to relay their experiences. Brendon Burns posted photos of the piles of silt outside his home in Richmond. Lianne Dalziel talked of the frustrations of trying to get things done in Christchurch East. From Wellington, Trevor Mallard posted a clip from Parliament TV of Selwyn MP Amy Adams.

Mallard wrote, "Not often I post a National Party speech, but this one from Adams captures the anguish in a way that transcends party politics".

It was a moving speech. But the same feelings were conveyed in a 10-word tweet from Christchurch after Wednesday morning's worst aftershock: "We wake. We shake. We don't want any more quakes."

- © Fairfax NZ News