It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... Facebook?

David Swan
Monday, 07 September 2009 10:47

Your IT - Entertainment

Facebook... Is there anything it can't do? Two girls were rescued from an Adelaide drain last night after alerting friends through their saviour, Facebook.

Melbourne's Herald Sun reported earlier today that two pre-teen girls used Facebook to call for help after getting stuck in a drain last night.

The newspaper reported that it's believed the girls, who are aged 10 and 12, were trapped in an Adelaide drain at around 7.30pm and used a mobile phone to update their Facebook status, which alerted friends and family of their predicament.

The girls survived unscathed, and were rescued by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade which used a ladder to successfully rescue the girls.

This event can be seen as both a triumph for the ubiquity of Facebook, but also a worrying sign of the times. Did the girls think of updating their Facebook before they thought of calling emergency services themselves? Similarly, do people now turn to online communication before making face-to-face contact?

Although the girls were successfully salvaged, common sense has clearly not prevailed in this case. Dialling 000 would have been far easier than navigating to the Facebook homepage.

It seems the world as we know it is 'going social', governments now utilize Twitter and Youtube to maintain communication between themselves and Generation Y, although whether this can be truly deemed as two way communication is questionable. We've also seen people 'tweeting' during plane crashes, and announcing breaking news such as the deaths of celebrities.

These girls may have faced near death, but perhaps more alarming for society is the sudden, inescapable reach of social networking. I am a fan of Facebook and Twitter and what they can accomplish, but when they replace traditional emergency services there's something very wrong.