I wasn’t going to write a blog post this morning, I have too much to do, flying to San Francisco later today for a workshop at Art.com with the miracle who is Ivy Ross and a small group of artists and storytellers from her amazing constellation of friends.
Then, as I was scanning my network, a pattern became too obvious to ignore:
Television news missed most of the Hurricane Irene story. Social networks did not. This may be the most visible, tightest-framed example I’ve ever seen of how narratives live differently, more dynamically, in networks than they do in the old inside-out media channels. And why improvisation trumps scripting.
From Wednesday on, the mainstream media beat the drum for a monolithic, fear-based narrative about Hurricane Irene. Don’t get me wrong. Precaution is good, and often necessary. “Worry,” William Inge said, “is the interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” The problem for the scripters of TV News is that this is the only narrative they had, and it became increasingly and visibly detached from most of the storm’s reality.
By Friday, CNN’s Wolf ‘Cry’ Blitzer was bouncing from correspondent to correspondent in search of bad news, and you could sense their desperation at not finding any. They were showing B-roll that could have been any Friday afternoon Raleigh-Durham traffic jam in the rain, and characterizing it as a panicking populace fleeing to higher ground. Politicians, camera whores that they are, played dutifully along.
By Saturday, kids were dancing around in their underwear behind your intrepid TV c0rrespondents who were doing their best to file Admiral Byrd’s dying words even as the dancing kids spoofed their phony narrative. 
Social and local networks, by contrast, were generating an entirely different portrait of the storm. It was not a picture of panic, but of ‘yes-anding’ the situation. Of neighbors connecting, and watching out for one another. Of helpful hyperlocal reporting about downed trees and street closures. Of beautiful photography from the beaches as Irene rolled in. Of friends gathering for a drink at their favorite martini bar, and bikers blazing through empty Manhattan streets.
Hurricane Irene Photo by Paige Minimi
When we play along with the fear-based narratives–be they our own or anyone else’s–there’s no opportunity, no expansion or growth. Irene is a scary bitch, stay inside, don’t answer a knock at the door, and whatever you do, don’t laugh at her or she will terrorize you like her sister, Katrina, did to New Orleans.
The reality of Irene is that she is a Hurricane With a Thousand Faces, and many of those faces are smiling. Find yourself a smiling Irene and dance.
