Image Credit - Forklift on Flickr

Image Credit - Forklift on Flickr

The Guardian’s Digital World blog has highlighted the outbreak of map mash-ups tracing the spread of the H1N1 virus currently centred on Mexico. The Guardian have their own site with the raw data available (their Data Store is an interesting development in itself) but also there are a load of others out there (see Google Maps Mania for a good selection).

Could this be the fist global pandemic to have every single case  mapped and online for us all to see within hours?

It obviously makes for a useful science and geography resource. There’s been quite a lot of discussion about using Twitter to follow developments in significant events and this is similar if a little less immediate.

I remember following natural disasters when doing geography at school. The Kobe Hanshin earthquake in 1995 sticks in my mind (mainly as my bro is about to emigrate to Osaka for 4 years and it’s just across the bay from there) but it was always filtered through the traditional journalistic media or later through text books.

Now we have the opportunity to watch events unfold in near enough real-time which is amazing but brings with it a couple of issues:

1) Educationally, these map mash-ups, Twitter feeds etc are the domain of the great unwashed (I count myself in that) so everything that appears has to be viewed critically. We’re used to encouraging students to view the press critically but it’s easier to do with a media institution like Fox News (where you can establish a political/commercial bias) than with a myriad micro-blog entries. It requires a different sort of skill to strip out the subjectivity with stuff on the web as you don’t know where people are starting from.

2) Socially, with all this extra info available to us about the spread of a disease are we going to be better placed to counter it or worse off. Control of information and the associated emotional reactions in society are an important element in disease control. What happens to human behaviour when this info is in the public domain.

I’m not saying that information should be censored. There be dragons! It’s just that the impact on behvaiour is going to be just as interesting as the technological developments themselves.

And before I get carried away with all this sociological guff, I have to keep reminding myself that people are actually dying!