Bushfire smoke is not an Instagram filter

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/australia-nsw-bushfire-twitterr

Version 0 of 1.

One stifling summer day in a far-too-hot-to-be-safe metal building at Winmalee High, the teacher asked us to write down what was best thing to do in our hometown. The most popular response was: leave Winmalee.

Winmalee has a population of 7,000, nestled amongst the vast bushland in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. It's beautiful and serene, yet still developed enough to be considered suburban. But its appeal is also what makes it so very dangerous.

I was nine the first time a bushfire forced us to flee Winmalee. Information back then was scarce – no Twitter, no News 24, no Instagram. Word from the firefighters, the radio, or neighbours told us that the fire was going to hit our area early that day. Dad stayed to fight the fire, and Mum packed myself, my brother, our cat and the photos – back when we printed them – in a car and drove to our aunt and uncle's house in Penrith, about half an hour away.

We didn't hear much that night about the fire. Perhaps a story about a neighbour's roof catching fire, a big explosion at the end of the street, a park burnt to the ground. But we had no real way of confirming it. 

The next day we heard that it was all over and we were clear to go home. Although the fire burnt down homes at the end of my street, mine was spared.

I finally left Winmalee to go to university. Now I'm in in the inner west of Sydney I am far from the increasingly frequent danger of bushfires, but I still have cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents up there.

For that reason alone, I couldn't be more thankful for social media. But 16,000 kilometres away in New York, the first I heard about the fires again ravaging my home town wasn't from family or former school friends, but from people in the inner city of Sydney Instagramming the haze of smoke and the red sun. Apply an appropriate filter, mention the zombie apocalypse, laugh and forget about it.

It was only later, when I checked Facebook and Twitter that I realised that the smoke came from bush and homes burning on the very street I grew up on.

I would say I was appalled by it, but it's not unexpected that a good portion of Sydney is so insular and insensitive. The dangers of bush fires are not a reality that many of them have ever faced.

Then there was the point-scoring: the Greens MP Adam Bandt seeking to make the bush fires all about the politics of the carbon tax; and some Twitter users abusing communications minister Malcolm Turnbull for his fibre-to-the-node NBN policy, claiming that a full fibre connection would be better in bushfire situations.

That time to make jokes about the inconvenient smoke, or try to win over a point about your pet topic to the politician you don't like, is not the time when houses are burning down and lives are at risk.

But thankfully such posts were the minority. Twitter kept me updated on the latest news on the locations of the fires, what had been lost, and connected me to everything I needed to know about Winmalee even though I'm on the other side of the planet. Facebook provided relief with the knowledge that my friends and family were safe. 

The immediacy of social media means that it is learning on its feet, and often in these situations it is clumsy at best. You often see both the best and worst of humanity in emergency situations, and it's no different on the internet.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.