The raw video footage and witness accounts coming out of Japan following the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami are tragic and surreal.

No other natural disaster of this magnitude has ever been captured with such chilling clarity, from so many different perspectives, and in so many different voices. The sheer amount of footage circulating the web is unprecedented, and watching any of it offers a vivid and humbling glimpse of the destruction as it unfolded.

I happened to be awake and watched everything happen in real-time, from a few minutes after the first wave struck land. At the time I was too stunned to realize it, but it occurs to me now that watching a tsunami wreck a coastline, live, from the other side of the planet, is a truly bizarre and fascinating experience, one that I am not likely to forget any time soon.

It strikes me as an interesting example of how small our world is getting, and how we’ve reached a never-before-seen level of perpetual global awareness and interconnectivity.

This phenomenon has only materialized in the last decade, with the rise of services like YouTube and Twitter and the increased popularity of social networking. Fifty years ago you might be lucky enough to hear about a disaster like this the day it happened; 150 years ago it might take weeks, if you ever heard about it at all.

The widespread and unrestricted ability for almost anyone to share news, stories and amateur videos in real-time on the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the worldwide interest and emotional investment elicited by natural disasters and other large-scale events.

To gauge how much has changed in a few short years, look back to December 2004, when a massive earthquake triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other near-by countries, killing a staggering 230,000 people. For a while, on major networks coverage was ubiquitous. But we didn’t see anywhere near the same level of first-person video footage, nor the number of detailed first-hand accounts that we have seen stream out of Japan in recent days.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, the Indian Ocean tsunami was so violent, and the impacted coastal infrastructure so underdeveloped, that few people were in a position to be filming or reporting at all. The Japanese were, in a nutshell, more structurally prepared and had world-class warning systems and evacuation procedures in place.

Another contributing factor is the Japanese penchant for advanced technology, especially personal electronics. In most built-up areas of Japan there is likely to be at least one video camera within recording distance of anything worthwhile, whether in a storefront surveillance system, mounted on a traffic light or built into a smart phone.

It’s hard to believe now, but in December 2004, YouTube was still a few months away from officially launching. Since then the website’s impact on the world has been astonishing. Today a search for “Indonesia tsunami 2004” on YouTube will return about 6,500 hits total. By contrast, “Japan tsunami 2011” returns 149,000 hits.

When the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, the world was still two and a half years away from its first tweet. During the tsunami last week, there were literally thousands of tweets every second. The UN has subsequently released a list of local and international journalists to follow on Twitter for critical updates.

But it wasn’t just YouTube and Twitter assisting the rest of the world in keeping in touch with what was happening in Japan. YouTube’s parent company Google was quick to establish an online resource hub on its homepage, with access to news updates as well as a missing person finder that is tracking approximately 350,000 records at the time of writing.

Wikipedia, which is fast becoming as much a news outlet as it is an encyclopedia, had arguably the most comprehensive article on the earthquake available posted in a little over an hour after it struck, beaten to the punch only by The New York Times.

From my geographically isolated perspective here in the prairies (practically as far from a tsunami as you could possibly get), no matter what I see on the screen in front of me I could never even begin to imagine what it would have been like to experience such a cataclysmic event first-hand.

With over 9,000 people confirmed dead and more than 13,000 still missing at time of print, the Tōhoku earthquake is the worst natural disaster to strike Japan in almost a century. In terms of magnitude on the Richter scale, it was the largest to ever hit the country. Japan is doing everything it can to repair and rebuild its crippled cities, all while risk of a nuclear crisis looms ominously at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

The Japanese have had more than their fair share of practice rebuilding after earthquakes and tsunamis, and they will manage it again, even though nuclear threats still weigh heavily on the hearts and minds of the country’s citizens. As they do what they can to contain a meltdown, the perpetual global awareness persists, and the whole world will be watching and hoping for the best.