This is my general experience with Twitter: It is very good for telling me that SOMETHING is happening but absolutely terrible for telling me what is happening because of the waves and delays of echoed rumours and misinformation. I like Twitter best when my carefully selected group of overlapping but disparate people brings me endless novelty and hate it when they repeat each other. I tend to tune it out at times when things jump off. After the earthquake in Japan as the reactors spent their first several hours in an uncertain state of melting down or not melting down was one of those times.

photo credit: Kaptain Kobold

In the early days of Twitter, when people were still making jokes about sandwiches and that media was conducting positively embarrassing interviews with the founders, there was a lot of discussion about what Twitter was for. The vision that Twitter settled on was to be the pulse of the planet. And so they set themselves to the task of getting real good at providing us with realtime information exchange.

The unexamined assumption is the same as in live TV reporting, that real time information MATTERS. I submit that it doesn’t, it really, really doesn’t in most contexts. Japan’s nuclear problem is like the story of Gabrielle Giffords’ changing health status and the soul searching that the media did afterwards. It does not matter that we had bad information for 30 minutes. It does not matter that Giffors was briefly thought to be dead and then turned out to be only mostly dead. Because for most of the world, that information does not matter within the granularity of the time that it was bad information.

At this moment, the current status of the nuclear plants in Japan matters for about 200,000 people in the world. This is the number of people who can do anything about it. Most of those 200,000 people can only decide whether or not to flee further away. They need information at the 15-minute scale probably. A very tiny minority of the people need information at the moment to moment scale. This is the team of people tasked with bringing the reactors under control. For the rest of us, we need information at the daily scale or less. Because the ramifications of Japan reactor situation IF THEY MATTER AT ALL matter in regard to decisions made at the scale of decades and centuries.

It is completely insane that countries are announcing that they are scaling back or cancelling nuclear programs based on Japan’s troubles. If those programs were a good idea two weeks ago they are still a good idea now. And if they might have been converted from a good idea to a bad idea based on evidence coming out of Japan then smart decision makers need to wait until the information has the stability and solidity of data that will support a decade/century scale decision.