In the 24 months I’ve lived Bangkok I’ve had to deal with two national — I guess this is the most appro­pri­ate word — cat­a­stro­phes, although in both, to date, I’ve not suf­fered physically.

The first, in the ear­lier half of 2010, was the ini­tially mostly peace­ful occu­pa­tion of sev­eral cen­tral parts of the city by 50,000+ Red Shirt sup­port­ers, fol­lowed by descent into the armed con­fronta­tion, fires and hor­ri­ble blood­shed that shook us all at time. It was geo­graph­i­cally near to us, although not that close in such a huge city, and despite the garbage in the for­eign media at no time did we feel at all unsafe — how­ever it was still hap­pen­ing in my city, in places I know well and regard as home, places I visit and pass through all the time. And, yes it was emo­tion­ally har­row­ing and exhausting.

I, like many who were lucky enough not to have been in the direct line of fire, per­haps didn’t realise quite how much so until a few weeks after­wards — hav­ing told our fam­i­lies and friends all was fine all the way through.

I blogged about it here and here.

And now, begin­ning some 14 months after the fires, we have these floods — var­i­ously touted here as the worst in 50 years, and the worst ever.

Whichever it is, and with­out mak­ing any wider claims about cli­mate change, there is no doubt these are annu­ally get­ting fiercer and more regular.

It’s an odd stale­mate at the moment. The waters seem stalled at the fast flow­ing and capac­ity filled Klong Bang Sue (pro­nounced Baang Seu for the ben­e­fit of the wag­gish) with only a few drib­bles — in rel­a­tive terms — find­ing their way a few metres south towards the expanses and tow­ers of cen­tral Din Daeng, and heav­ily built up north of Vic­tory Mon­u­ment zones that mostly sig­nify the start of the inner Bangkok ‘burbs.

As with almost every nat­ural cat­a­strophic event (or, really, any event) of the last 36 months or more, social media has dri­ven the report­ing and news flow. In both instances here the tra­di­tional news reportage and the the out­lets for that — TV, news­pa­per, radio — have been left behind scur­ry­ing around to add quickly dated past data to their increas­ingly irrel­e­vant online, paper, and — with one excep­tion in Thai­land this time — broad­cast outlets.

What has really hit me this time is the way the social con­ver­sa­tions have mutated too, in just over a year. Pro­foundly — both struc­turally and in content.

Twit­ter has increas­ing usurped Face­book, despite the fact that in Bangkok alone some 8 mil­lion plus peo­ple have FB accounts and this time around lit­tle of impor­tance — at least in the Eng­lish lan­guage which of course is a major pro­viso in Thai­land but it can be per­haps judged by how much activ­ity is on twit­ter in Thai and by the fact that any site of any note in the Thai lan­guage sec­tor is being either dual-languaged, or linked to in the Eng­lish dis­course — seems to be on Zuckerberg’s mon­ster aside from pri­vate chat and the usual bar­rage of phone images.

So, yes Twit­ter is it, and Twit­ter is being con­tin­u­ally linked to at least a dozen semi-live Google maps includ­ing the very use­ful one on the Bangkok Metro Admin­is­tra­tion flood site (in Thai, but with Google trans­la­tor that’s no bar­rier) which also links to a range of other data such includ­ing the hugely impor­tant live klong (canal) lev­els feed, and the defin­i­tive one from a retired French army topog­ra­pher, @thaikamala, and updated every hour or so.

They all show an almost stag­nant front­line (and stag­nant it will be as the water recedes — yeekk) over the past few days despite the end­less naysay­ers preach­ing and pray­ing for obliv­ion and ‘equal pain’ for the city south.

And that is where, too, Twit­ter has changed.

In 2010 it made sense to fol­low sev­eral key peo­ple, most espe­cially a few key reporters and adven­tur­ous, brave (read: often insane) free­lancers. They fired a con­stant string of instant news reports in less than 140 char­ac­ters which pro­vided a con­tin­u­ous news and infor­ma­tion stream often 24 hours ahead the printed medi­ums, which seemed to remain largely obliv­i­ous of the paradigm shift.

The printed medium is still as irrel­e­vant as it was in 2010 this time around but the infor­ma­tion flow dri­ving twit­ter no longer comes from the peo­ple who may work for, or have some con­nec­tion to a tra­di­tional MSM base.

I’m no longer fol­low­ing a list, but, instead, depen­dent on a hash tag. Tags are noth­ing new, we all use them daily — to search and fol­low or cre­ate trends. And yep, I used tags to nar­row or search last time around, but this was com­pli­cated by the fact that there was no defined sin­gle tag and thus we had a con­fu­sion of #s which seem to mul­ti­ply almost daily.

The story has changed this: in 2010 the story was dri­ven by key play­ers and deci­sion mak­ers and localised in a series of key loca­tions, thus reporters and news­folk had access that the rest could not hope to have and the role of the mass twit­terati was to just fire crowd-sourced tweets of hap­pen­ing events as they tran­spired, along­side the inevitable raft of opin­ions, the­ory and asides.

2011 is com­pletely dif­fer­ent beast. We have a huge mass of almost uncon­trol­lable water, many bil­lions of litres, bear­ing down on one of the most pop­u­lated urban areas on the planet.

The gov­ern­ment, both local and national, have — for a vari­ety of rea­sons — for all their mixed efforts, time and time again been cast aside by the bru­tal force of a sod­den mother nature as it moves down towards the sea, fol­low­ing the paths of least resistance.

Repeat­edly, over and over, gov­ern­ment has made promises to both Thai­land and to the global indus­tries and stock mar­kets — caus­ing global eco­nomic tur­moil that will go deep into 2012 — that it hasn’t been able to keep.

These have come back to bite a young gov­ern­ment - per­haps unfairly, but bite badly it does, and the polit­i­cal endgame is going to play out long after the flood have gone.

This means, how­ever, that many of the deci­sions and much of the pub­lic momen­tum, aside from evac­u­a­tions and the final semi-successful mas­sive bar­rier, cou­pled with pumps, laid across the north of cen­tral and east Bangkok, have been largely stripped out of the hands and head­quar­ters of officialdom.

The story, instead has come from peo­ple in the front line, both in the floods and await­ing the water. All fif­teen mil­lion or so of us.

And that’s taken the essen­tial twit­ter source away from those lists of insid­ers to the much wider world defined by the tags #thai­flood, in Thai, and #thai­flood­eng, for we Eng­lish speakers.

Both tags also seemed to have estab­lished them­selves in twit­ter­stan with­out deci­sion or for­mal pro­to­col and then were organ­i­cally adopted. Nobody decided — offi­cially that is — that these tags were to become the con­ver­sa­tion pit and news zone for the floods. They sim­ply did and they’ve become all pervasive.

They’ve become com­mu­ni­ties. Nat­u­rally #thai­flood is some­where I rarely go for obvi­ous rea­sons, but #thai­flood­eng has been run­ning in my saved tags almost con­tin­u­ously for the last three weeks at least.

I like it, find it invalu­able — and I hate it.

The reg­u­lar sub­scribers and tweet­ers (of which I’m not one — I lurk, absorb and derive infor­ma­tion — expa­tria the world over ter­ri­fies me mostly) have obvi­ously per­son­al­i­ties — some pos­i­tive, some neg­a­tive and all devel­op­ing as the days and weeks pass.

There are the angry folk — many pissed off that they’re hav­ing to deal with up to two metres of water out­side or down­stairs. You feel their pain but there are a few — more than a few — who are keen to see any­one who hasn’t had to suf­fer, most espe­cially those of us in the parts of Bangkok which remain dry, despite the fairly obvi­ous fact that trash­ing the cen­tral infra­struc­ture of the nation and the cap­i­tal not going to reduce their pain, nor is it going to be help­ful as the nation recov­ers from the per­sonal and eco­nomic pain that these things cause.

There are the stir crazy, stuck in a increas­ingly skanky watery world that seems to have no near end. Ratio­nal­ity seems to have become more and more, as the days become weeks, sub­sumed by anger and irrationality. Some have become pro­gres­sively worse, lash­ing out at oth­ers they see as more for­tu­nate, as time passes. It hurts to watch.

There are a few who are just plain nasty — they hate Thai­land, they hate Asia, they hate every­thing. Mostly they just pol­lute the forums of Thai Visa but this seems to have offered another vehi­cle for their odi­ous­ness. Their pro­files are mostly anonymous.

Then there is the woman who writes a rea­son­ably good food blog, albeit on the con­ser­v­a­tive side. Her ear­lier tweets were help­ful and pos­i­tive, although the afore­men­tioned nas­ties jumped on her and accused her of try­ing to push traf­fic to her blog, to which the obvi­ous response was, yes, so what…

Sadly as the waters sur­rounded her place, she increas­ingly slipped into the mode of the angry folk, clam­our­ing to see the whole uni­verse swamped with a metre of water and to hell with it. They deserve it too.

A shame.

There are end­less key­board pun­dits.  Opin­ions, con­spir­a­cies, counter opin­ions, some of inter­est, some less so, some cau­tiously expressed, some less so. Unin­formed — mostly — arm­chair pun­dits espouse the­o­ries on water flows/physics/religion/politics/grand plans/climatology/water barriers/chemistry and just about any­thing else.

Fil­ter­ing the dis­in­for­ma­tion and noise from any­thing more worth­while has, or at least is until you quickly work out who’s who, become a time con­sum­ing skill.

YuroFukurou’s user-friendly block­ing fil­ters are work­ing overtime.

This group has a large noisy sub-group: those who end­lessly mock the cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter and her gov­ern­ment — because we know that they would’ve done so very much better.…

Blam­ing a gov­ern­ment who were only just being sworn in as the waters forced their way south seems to be de rigour for many, echo­ing the litany of vit­ri­olic columns in the strongly anti-incumbent daily rag The Nation.

*to clar­ify — and cover my butt here: I’m not tak­ing a pro or anti any­one stance  - I view Thai pol­i­tics as an inter­ested but con­fused non-partisan observer*

And there are, by a mar­gin, the plain help­ful (lest I be accused of broad­sid­ing all the, lit­er­ally, thou­sands who have posted to the tag) includ­ing a small group of ded­i­cated ama­teurs (or not quite so ama­teur — think­ing of the tire­less work of Richard Bar­row, a travel blogger, who has lit­er­ally cycled his way around the city tweet­ing reports daily as he goes) who have posted and reported news in a fairly ded­i­cated way and given us the daily sto­ries — cru­cial as the water seemed unstop­pable — that much of the city was depend­ing on.

An extra­or­di­nar­ily mov­ing series of tweets today told the story of a mus­lim fam­ily who’s two year old had just drowned. They were unable to bury the tod­dler within 24 hours as required as the ceme­tery was underwater.

Given the flow, dom­i­nance, pre­cise­ness and imme­di­acy of news online from non-traditional sources it’s less than sur­pris­ing that — Eng­lish lan­guage at least, the two daily papers have, after a brief attempt early on, set­tled in an almost numbed min­i­mal­ist report­ing phase, offer­ing lit­tle more than reit­er­a­tions of press releases and recount­ing the opin­ions cast else­where by informed oth­ers. The Nation has moved its pri­mary focus back to to its ongo­ing semi-obsessive agenda of crit­i­cis­ing the new gov­ern­ment what­ever it does, includ­ing this week relent­less attacks on Yingluck for plan­ning atten­dance at the long sched­uled APEC Con­fer­ence, and then — a day later — for can­celling the trip (Hillary is com­ing to her instead), whilst The Bangkok Post seems to have more or less given up full stop, revert­ing to the stock mar­ket and the odd travel story and restau­rant review.

The evening on-line flurry of news updates (writ­ten I assume as they pre­pare the next day’s print edi­tion) attempt­ing to catch up on a day which they’ve mostly missed seen some­how sad and only under­line how much they’ve abdi­cated — unwill­ingly or even unknow­ingly as is the way with most daily press world­wide — their news role to the amateurs.

Instead, the nightly PBS broad­casts (in both Thai and Eng­lish) fea­tur­ing Dr. Seri Suparathit of Rangsit Uni­ver­sity Cen­tre on Cli­mate Change and Dis­as­ter, a easy, well spo­ken well regarded Asian expert on nat­ural dis­as­ters (the Japan­ese involved him post-Tsunami) have become a national must watch and the pro­fes­sor has become the first super­star of the floods — his words are eagerly and instantly dis­sected by twit­ter & talk radio.

“He is the ONLY one I trust” wrote one tweeter on #thai­flood­eng — undoubtably helped by the fact that he seems to have more of a pre­dic­tive under­stand­ing of the day to day progress of the waters than any­one the gov­ern­ment agen­cies seem able to produce.

There’ll soon be Seri T shirts in the mar­kets if they’re not there already.

The pic­tures on this page were taken yes­ter­day at Lad Prao Junc­tion, Chatuchak Park, Bang Sue Klong at both Ratchada and just south of Chatuchak.

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