What May 21st Said About Social Media

Saturday, May 21, 2011 was a wedding anniversary, birthday or other momentous occasion for some. For others, May 21, 2011 was the day during which many believed or at the very least feared that the heavily publicized predictions of 89-year-old Christian broadcaster, Harold Camping's "rapture" could have some validity. Whether you were a believer or cynic in regards to Camping's predictions of the "end times", as a generation, we can unanimously agree that this end of the world scare will go down in history as the property of social media.  

Harold Camping gained momentum amongst today's generation after making a startling prediction earlier this year that the world as we know it would end on May 21, 2011 with what many religious believers refer to as "The Rapture". Camping's prediction included intimate details about these end times, including an exact time at which catastrophic earthquakes were said to begin destroying the sinners remaining on Earth after the second coming of Jesus Christ.

As the hours passed and May 21st arrived for many countries overseas, where was it that fearful or even curious followers of this supposed rapture turned to? Twitter. The choice of many to turn to a website in general, let alone a social networking site which runs solely off of user generated content, makes a significant statement about our generation. We truly are living in the era of the internet and social media.

May 21, 2011 was the first prediction of the end of the world that took place during a time of such social transparency. The Y2K scare of 1999 and other similar predictions took place during times of lesser technology that did not connect people across the globe. It is, in fact, arguable if Harold Camping's prediction's hype is a direct result of its viral spread across social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

May 21st reminds us of two key characteristics of our current state of technology. First of all, we live in a society in which all individuals are informed, including all age groups and all financial classes. The news never ceases to be broadcast and the mediums by which individuals can receive news are multiplying by the second, making breaking stories accessible to any individual. Today's news is instantaneous. As reports came in across the internet that Christmas Island, Kiribati (an otherwise unknown location) was the first of the world to experience and live through 6PM on May 21st without a world ending earthquake, people across the globe celebrated via tweets and Facebook statuses after learning of this information via those same social networking sites. In that moment, all who participated became instaneous broadcasters. 

This brings me to the second statement that May 21st has made regarding our world's current technology. Social media undoubtably is the way of the future. In years prior, only trained professionals or trusted news anchors could deliver us information regarding such serious events as the supposed end of the world. Yet when crisis struck and fear took over, thousands of individuals turned to Twitter as their source of information. And as the clock struck 6PM in Christmas Island and progressively in other countries across the globe, the world rejoiced together. Predictions of Camping's Rapture immediately became a bit less frightening regardless of the fact that people were reading tweets published by strangers.

The atmosphere on the internet was quite warm on the eve of May 21st and the internet's bombastic social media capabilities are to blame. Sites like Twitter reconnect us in a way humans have not been connected in decades. Our world is drastically smaller now that we are in contact with individuals we may not even know in our "real lives" in countless virtual ways. The fear amongst some users was similar to the fear that some experience regarding terrorism on a daily basis. This unique kind of fear brings humanity as a whole together. And in our social networking based world, we now find comfort in the text based, faceless messages of people that are complete strangers when it comes down to it. Now, everyone with an internet connection has a voice. The world is changing. Communication is changing. This rapture belongs to the internet.

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