Life and Death of Evidence: The Role of Digital Interactions during Mexico's Earthquake

Abstract

Social media played a fundamental role on Mexico's earthquake, it bring us new solutions but created some other problematics that were unexpected. Millions of users shared their experiences faster than any other traditional media but the use and abuse of their evidence impacted the way we faced the crisis. Earthquakes are extreme case scenarios where social medias couldn't forecast the different consequences of their design decisions that impacts people's lifes. As producers of contents, all our evidence is storage on the digital sphere, always available, unchangeable, static, waiting to be rescue for interpretation. Most of the evidence that generate chaos after the earthquake happened because they were digitally alive, being shared over and over without control, for hours and days and when it finally reach you it was no longer useful. But on a scenario where temporality is crucial and minutes can define life or death, should we kill our evidences in pro for a better communication?