Hive Health

London has been under some pressure over the last few days and our state of alert continues. Those of us living centrally have spent the night with sirens speeding by, Sky news on in the background and  images of familiar places burning. It’s been a shameful few days in a city that’s not represented by the here and now.

Here is not the place to discuss cause, effect and blame and the use of social media by the gangs is better described here by The Guardian.

What was apparent for me was that my requirement for  information morphed significantly with the proximity of the crisis. Last night we sat at home 200 metres from a shop being looted. This tends to concentrates your requirement for up to date local information. The usual media sources midst crisis – local radio and Sky news were relegated – neither were local or up to minute enough. The repeated images of the same burning car in Hackney – annoyed us, we wanted the situation relevant to our postcode, interpreted by our community with immediacy.

Sat over a bottle of wine and a pie we consumed local tweets (#islington, #upper street, #angel) that allowed us to share intel‘ on the gangs of kids as they moved up from Hackney.  Tweeted GPS locations and vivid descriptions filled our blanks rapidly. As the posse progressed down Essex Road, we could access videos uploaded to YouTube from links on Twitter, seeing our local shops being hit by hoods, bikes being stolen and fights breaking out between looters and shop keepers. A Norway based news service streamed high def images from news helicopter 2000 meters above. As the data streamed in to our various phones, Ipad and iMac it became increasingly apparent that the traditional news channels were collecting news from the same sources we were. But hampered by their broader national bias and their editorial need for film and images to fill our TVs. Whilst we needed info, in any form as long as it was local, and immediate.

To me the crisis environment has a parallel to any moment when control is being lost. Whether that’s a scum burning a JD sports in your local area, the economy crashing down or a health scare. Our need for information midst this is pretty similar. We need information from people like us, nearby, giving real time reliable information and ideally on demand. What we are given is so often lowest common denominator news,  generalised information, thats not ‘local’ enough to us to be worthwhile.