ABSTRACT
Almost everything thing we know now, and especially what we knew of the quake and tsunami in the hours and even days after the events, was signifi cantly shaped by social media. In fact, the generation of information and images occurred at such a fast pace, that social media not only represented, but also directly mediated our experience of the quake more than any other natural disaster to date. If Vietnam was the fi rst war fully experienced through television, 3/11 was the fi rst natural disaster fully experienced through social media. This is the result of a number of factors, some a function of the way that technology use has developed in Japan, especially the fact of mobility of hand-held media, others due to the particular ways that the networks of people reacted in the time of crisis.
