San Diego Fires - How 1 fire compares to the island of Manhattan, NYC (all the fires are bigger than the tri-state area!)

San Diego Fires - How 1 fire compares to the island of Manhattan, NYC (all the fires are bigger than the tri-state area!)

Image by Tricia Wang 王圣捷
it was only today - Day #4 of the San Diego fires - did my friends on the East Coast start calling me to make sure I was not on fire and that my house was not burning down. This map demonstrates how truly catastrophic this 1 fire (of 8 other large fires) is- not because it shows how big this 1 fire is is, but because it shows how it compares to the city of Manhattan. Oh my NYC-Centric friends - the world doesn't make sense unless it is put into the context of your world? (I am not being 100% sarcastic, I am one of those NYC-centric people)

The stupid media has only been focusing on LA's celebrities up until today - and then they realized - wow the Malibu fire is sooo miniscule compared to the fact that the ENTIRE COUNTY OF SAN DIEGO IS BURNING DOWN! Even my friend Roger in Sweden knew about San Diego's fires before my friends on the East Coast. That's horrible! He said the video he watched of the SD fires on Day #2, Monday - reported that the SD fires were worse than the LA fires. This is SWEDEN!!!!!! Can you believe that? What's worse - I and many other bloggers in SD have been posting about what we are going through - so it's not like we've been silent.

This clearly shows a need for more sophisticated and different levels of information reporting - if I and many others have been flickring and voxing about this for days and the large media conglomerates failed to pick up on the seriousness of this - it is clear something is wrong with how certain news is highlighted while some are ignored - and this also shows that we need a different outlet that focuses on first-hand accounts from bloggers and etc.

This happens all the time around the world - bloggers were posting about the recent Myamar/Burma killings of civilians - but it took a while for "official" news outlets to pick on it. This happens all the time in Africa and China. Just because people are writing about it online does not mean their information will get picked up. We need a new kind of media outlet that will be good at doing just that - specializing in first-hand online accounts. There is nothing democratic about the internet.

You can read my other thoughts about the racial class politics of San Diego fires here, National news coverage of SD fires here, distortion of wildfires here, emphasis of LA over SD here, and what a Sociologist would do during a fire here. this was photo overlay was created by tim