The recent report about swine flu reaching pandemic status, coupled with the retraction by the WHO as to the number of people actually killed by the virus points to a worrying conclusion. Social media can, in fact, cause panic in places where it is not really warranted. Granted, hysteria is rarely an admirable attribute but if it must occur, perhaps it should be relegated to those situations backed, to at least some degree, by fact.

This is not really too much to ask for and some people, including the ideologically tenacious Ron Paul of Texas have further pointed out the advantageous conditions this situation creates for career politicians. Their stern faced concern for ‘our children’ has led to soccer games being banned, closed gatherings and the isolation of a community’s members from one another. Instead of going outside and breathing fresh air, America’s and indeed the world’s children have been encouraged to stay indoors snuggled up against their video game consoles while mother ,gorging herself on stale air, frantically scrolls through the most current twitter updates on this impending scourge to humanity.

Politicians like to appear active and in control. Decisive and concerned. This recent outbreak of horrors has given them an ideal stage to perform all manner of posturing while actually performing very little work other than to close schools down for a few days.

What this seems to illustrate is the persistently tantalizing nature of disaster and how thirst for updates to it’s progress has in no way been quenched by the glorious ascension of New Media. In fact, rather than waiting for the 5:00 PM update, as was the case in Cronkite’s day. Or the 15 news cycle spew of CNN, we can get it in real time simply by reloading the Twitter search page.

And each comment magnifies the last, few of them verifiable or checkable by peers, even if those peers are the anointed ‘feet on the ground’ of Twitterati reverential overtures. Indeed, in an effort to establish the value of New Media, we are all, perhaps subconsciously, helping to magnify this hype so that we can say ‘See! Twitter has value!’.

What shows value is that one can feel comfortable pointing this irrational behavior out for what it is, knowing full well that social media is an evolutionary step in communications and will continue to grow despite our best efforts to drag it back into last century.

Care is needed, however. Using the analogy of fire in a crowded theater, we now have several people with no authority and unsubstantiated sources shouting fire in a room spread out across the world with a population of millions. The misinformation had apparently gotten so bad that the WHO was forced to release false information and overly cautious measures in order to keep the chicken littles from drowning by looking up at the rain.

There is a lesson here, politicians, in general, are filthy liars and crooks but they are not stupid. They will be leveraging the power of Facebook, Twitter, Digg and all the rest just as much as you in order to stay employed and in your wallet. What’s more important, though, is that as the population of these networks grows, so will the their power to send shock waves across the globe. While the cornficker virus made headlines, the swine flu has come upon us with the the world’s first mindf*** without borders.

Netizens, falsely secure in the sense that they are now free from the manipulations of corporate media are now able, minus the help of Rupert Murdoch, of tweeting themselves right into the world’s FEMA camps, and all without the friendly and earnest guidance of Blackwater.

Perhaps, this isn’t a lesson at all, but a warning.

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