Covering Disaster

"Information flows must be two-way to be effective—from the external world to the affected community, but
also from those affected to the agencies seeking to help them in useful ways."
In this article, this is one part that stuck out to me. A lot of times, people dont see information as a two-way flow between parties. Many times, people see their message as a one way street. That they only want to get the information that they want to get out there and then they expect nothing in return. People also dont understand that oftentimes, their messages are much more widespread than they think. When people use the world wide web, they oftentimes do not understand the reach that they have. In regards to the introduction of this article, in Iran, protesters are looking for information from websites that Iranian officials are also posting false information on. This is very interesting. People look for information on trusted websites, as the executive summary had mentioned. Another part that I found interesting was in the introduction, they mentioned that new technologies are used for people to help prepare for, respond and recover from major disasters. This is very popular now with social media. Twitter, Facebook, email, and Youtube are all used to help raise awareness and also raise funds for countries experiencing major disasters.
New communication technologies are also used for early warning systems. Technology of detecting these disasters has become much more advanced and so has communication technologies. People are able to know much sooner that something is going to happen or has just happened because of cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This technology could help with so many different issues in relaying messages because so many people are tuned into them that the message can be reached by a giant audience in a very short period of time.
I think that communication technologies is an amazing concept and I'm very glad that we have it today.