And pigs might fly....
By now, unless you have been cut off from all known forms of communication, you'll have heard about swine flu.
From headlines declaring that ‘all of humanity is under threat’ to breakfast television broadcasts showing anxious parents at the gates of their child’s school clutching anti viral medication, there is, it seems, no escaping from the fact that a pandemic is nigh.
Yet whilst most of us are being bombarded with Sky News footage of planes grounded on run ways in Mexico and live links to the UN’s crisis talks urging, it is a less visual medium that seems intent on reporting this crisis on a minute by minute basis.
Love it or hate it, Twitter is rapidly gaining thousands upon thousands of tweets that relate directly to the outbreak. A lot of these tweets simply provide links to mainstream sources of news and information. A lot however, contain misinformed nonsense, from conspiracy theories to warnings about eating pork sausages.
Given Twitter's rising prominence, some have criticised it as a mere breeding ground for scaremongering – a dangerous tool for the misinformed. Is this criticism deserved? Well yes.... and no.
If we're going to make a tally of those who are due criticism for swine flu hysteria, add the mainstream media to the list. Yes, this is a fundamentally important story and public health officials around the world wouldn't be doing their jobs if they weren't taking the risk seriously. People do need to be made aware of the situation and the media has a role to play in that.
But the mainstream media has played its role in ratcheting up the hysteria.
One could argue that traditional forms of media do a better job providing accurate information and context over Twitter's gossipy entries. But it's hard to argue that the same mainstream media, that created 24-hour news and set the gold standard for sensationalist headlines, hasn't fomented the type of hyperactive chatter that exists on Twitter and that is now being criticised.
If observers are going to criticise the behaviour of people on Twitter, that's fair to an extent. There is after all plenty of valid criticism to be made. But let's not pretend that Twitter is alone in generating swine flu hysteria either.