I used to be on-line, like I at all times appear to be, when Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida earlier this week. I flicked via Twitter and endlessly scrolled TikTok because the afternoon stretched into night.
It was a bizarre, troubling expertise. Being on-line throughout a pure catastrophe like Ian is a wierd mixture of dwell devastation and the same old web oddities. Flood waters rising and other people memeing it in actual time in an countless stream of updates. That’s the essence of being on-line in 2022: Every thing is terrible, let’s maintain scrolling.
We’re simply now starting to see the precise toll Ian took. The Solar Sentinel reported not less than 21 folks have died in Florida, with hundreds extra folks left unaccounted. Hundreds of thousands had been with out energy Friday after the Class 4 storm pummeled the state with excessive winds and flooding. Even for a state fairly conversant in hurricanes, Ian proved to be significantly terrible.
“This might be the deadliest hurricane in Florida’s historical past,” President Joe Biden stated Thursday afternoon. “The numbers are nonetheless unclear, however we’re listening to early studies of what could also be substantial lack of life.”
As this lethal storm reached its peek this week, the primary viral video I noticed was…of a shark. It is a bit of web lore: a faux picture of a shark swimming via a catastrophe zone that famously resurfaces throughout huge storms. The primary illegitimate picture, of a shark swimming on a freeway, appeared in 2011 amid Hurricane Irene. Since then, there’s been varied reiterations of the meme. So when a actual video of what seems to be a small shark (or another sort of fish) thrashing about on a flooded road in Fort Myers, Florida, surfaced throughout Ian, folks instantly began sharing it throughout their feeds. The quick clip has since racked up greater than 13 million views.
Hurricane Shark wasn’t the one video to go viral as Ian hit. Some dude ran out to fly a Philadelphia Eagles flag because the storm made landfall. In one other clip, folks swam within the storm surge (which we positively do not advise). On TikTok, you would watch as zookeepers cheerfully walked storks and different animals to a toilet for security.
I would categorize all these movies as curiosities: surreal clips of animals exterior of their habitats and other people making unhealthy selections, two hallmarks of the web. You may even name it enjoyable, relying on which social media platform you had been on. As a result of over on a distinct nook of the web, the reliable horrors of Hurricane Ian had been inescapable.
On TikTok, folks went dwell as their properties had been flooded, seemingly unprepared for the injury and coping with actual, severe hazard. As The Washington Publish‘s Taylor Lorenz famous on Twitter, TikTok is the place for real-time information. Scrolling via my FYP was like watching a found-footage horror film in actual time. The footage turned so overwhelming that I needed to put my telephone down. Seeing all these folks in real-life hazard was harrowing to look at, and it made me really feel helpless. There was no reduction from TikTok’s savvy algorithm.
After all, there was additionally your typical clout-grifting off the wake of the storm. Lorenz famous folks had been stealing streams and pretending they had been genuine. NBC Information tradition reporter Kat Tenbarge posted that individuals had been asking for engagement on their content material because the storm performed out.
That is all to say that whereas there could also be a really actual Hurricane Shark on the market, swimming down a Florida road, the web during which it exists hasn’t modified very a lot since 2011. Persons are nonetheless exploiting a pure catastrophe for clicks, even these on the heart of the storm. There is a tremendous line between documenting an occasion and filming issues for clout, asking folks to observe alongside. And even the identical hoaxes popped up on our timelines (Hurricane Shark, meet Road Manatee). Even because the web evolves, our on-line habits would not.
As Bo Burnham as soon as sang, the web is just a little little bit of all the pieces all the time. Even within the eye of a storm, that is still true.
