Once upon a time when things happened, like an airliner suddenly going missing yet leaving a mysterious trail, we were reliant on mainstream news media and either Government appointed or media chosen ‘experts’ to tell us what was might be going on.
Indeed, a single nightly news bulletin on television, a news programme on the radio, or the next day’s newspapers were the only place where we could really get to know what was going on. And, if a person listening suddenly had a light-bulb moment and sussed what the truth might be, then he or she had no way of communicating this to media, the authorities, or the world.
That was then and this is now.
Now we have instant media, social media, and anybody can with equal status chip in to make their point and ‘put it out there’.
This comes at a price, as has been demonstrated on a number of levels by the MH370 mystery.
Firstly, you have the rude and cruel idiots. To them, making jokes about 239 people who could be dead, is hilarious. They have no care for the hurt and pain of the families. 239 missing people with fate unknown is hilarious to these low-life. They are just fodder for what they consider to be humour. Tasteless inappropriate jokes rule in their minds. Of course, were they sitting anxiously waiting for news of the whereabouts of their loved one they’d behave very differently. Yet, because they are unaffected, it’s all fair game.
Secondly, you have the conspiracy theorists. These are the ones who tell us that the aircraft was abducted by aliens or shot down by the Americans in order to distract from events in Crimea. Some of these people spouting all this nonsense actually believe what they say, the rest are using it as an opportunity to see how good their echo is. You know, like shouting and waiting for your voice to come back. They do this in the same way as chain letters and chain emails work. “Pass this on” and stroke my ego when I count the retweets is what they are really up to.
Thirdly, you have those who just don’t get it. They ask and re-ask questions. Stupid questions. And, heck it’s not just the terminally stupid on social media that ask stupid questions. Even on CNN they ask if it’s possible the plane disappeared into a Black Hole. Some people are so very very stupid.
But, having filtered out all those, along with the late-comers, you know the ones who 10 days after the event suddenly say, “What’s this about a plane going missing?“, you then have the remaining very useful people. Ok, ‘useful people’ probably makes up only 10 percent of the traffic on social media, and they can be hard, but not impossible, to dig out from all the noise.
These are the people who want to help, despite being thousands of kilometres away, and having no real experience with search and rescue. And, help is what they did and do.
As the facts were painstakingly slowly confirmed, experienced pilots took to blogs and social media in order to write plausible scenarios that fitted all the facts together into a bigger jigsaw. From these came the plausible idea that MH370 had ‘hidden’ from radar by shadowing another flight until it was able to break off and go on its way once it has passed areas it would otherwise have been detected flying through. There were also widely distributed theories about how a fire had broken out on board and the pilot had been heading to a known runway.
Indeed, the latter theory had legs, and got mainstream media attention until further generations of social media users and bloggers were able to debunk it because it didn’t tick all the boxes when it came to satisfactorily explaining all the known events such as the satellite ‘pings’.
Sometimes referred to as ‘crowdsourcing‘, ordinary people were also able to pick their way through hundreds of thousands of satellite pictures of the areas most likely to give up a clue as to where MH370 might be. These were useful people wanting to help, and who were able to help from their own homes, when it came to eliminating useless data in favour of the more useful.
So, these days ‘ordinary people’ can get involved in searching for missing aircraft or postulating until the truth that’s out there is homed in on. Yet we all still feel so very useless and frustrated.
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