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The immediacy and intensity with which social networks responded to the situation enabled the world to learn about the disaster and the people in the eye of the storm, at a pace that was unfathomable just a decade or so ago.

housands of netizens took to the social networks and online forums to share information, communicate with friends and family, reach out to people and express solidarity with those affected by the situation.

In fact, Twitter posted a guide in Japanese and English to assist people under duress with tips and resources to help them survive through the situation. It also offered a list of the most widely used hashtags to tweet about the disaster, helping users search for tweets from friends and family. According to Poynter, the hashtags #tsunami and #prayforjapan were trending thousands of tweets per second in the immediate aftermath.

Facebook too had its share of conversation, but then it does not enjoy the scale of success in Japan which it does elsewhere in the world. While a lot of international conversation was being written on the walls of Facebook, the Japanese themselves were flocking to Mixi, the leading social networking site in Japan. Mixi has over 20 million users in Japan and it was the first place where the devastated people rushed to, looking for messages from people living around the epicentre of the earthquake and in the path of the gigantic tsunami waves.

Skype became the preferred tool for voice and visual communication between people inside Japan and to communicate with families living overseas.

Google, the world's most recognisable entity on the Internet, probably had the most significant response among the various online communities working to alleviate and share the pain of the Japanese.

At last count, the site was tracking about 326,300 records.

Google took it a step further by launching a crisis response page, consolidating all the tools and resources related to the crisis on one page.

Google collected these details manually into the person finder app, helping to grow the database and connect an ever-increasing number of people.

No matter the form of the response, it is becoming clear that a wired universe is weaving itself into the fabric of our evolution. If the means with which we communicate with each other in the moments that truly define our existence are any indication, social networking is undoubtedly the primary tool of long-distance communication for the current generation.