The Sky Is Falling! (or The Global, Electronic, Real-Time Flood of information)
The recent earthquake in Chile, followed by the Tsunami drama really exercised the ever-evolving web in interesting ways that I’m sure I still don’t fully comprehend.
An interesting quote from an article got me thinking about how technology has made the world substantially smaller, while also potentially amplifying the rate of change of events from the perspective of the observer. In reality, the rate of change of events might not have changed at all on a global scale, but the scope of information feeds via the web have increased dramatically, and accelerated the rate which an observer gets the information. It’s changed the way people get information. It’s changed the way journalists report. It’s changing the way the advertising models are working in relation to traditional news media vs web media.
Before the web (and WAY before Twitter), we used to read about events in the newspapers or find out about them on the radio or the evening news. Since the news producers had to filter the content of what they thought was important news down to 40 minutes (allowing 20 minutes for commercials) out of a 24 hour day, or into a newspaper format that followed the “above the fold” guideline, we didn’t hear about most of the world events that didn’t fit a “very important” category.
Now, we can create our own news feeds from several channels via the web. We create our own filters to determine what is “important” or “above the fold”, and we can learn about events from any of the 194 countries. Many of these countries didn’t even have coverage from news channels unless they were involved in global negotiations or in a war. Now, information is published with a laptop and a webcam as long as some kind of infrastructure exists to connect the user.
When a global event occurs that is of some urgency, the first “noise” comes from Twitter. Then the news agencies start picking it up. Then reporters and observers start Goggling (or Bing’ing or whatever) all the relavent information about the event in order to give background on the event, or to try to predict the future based on the event.
It’s completely overwhelming!
I watched several news and webcam feeds on mashable.com of the earthquake and the resulting tsunamis and I’m struck by how far the maturity of our network of communication has advanced. I think it is probably exponential over the past 5 years, but someone would have to develop the complex mathematical model that connected all of the bazillions of dots and determine the 4D rate of change.
Google Earth had almost up to date pictures from the areas surrounding Chile, as well as an analytical bubble chart showing all of the earthquake points around the earth along with frequency and magnitude. Incredible! Obviously, Conception, Chile had the biggest bubble at 8.8. Next, I found myself rotating the Google Earth globe to see what islands were in the Tsunami path, the searching for breaking news from those islands to see if the Tsunami had reached them or not.
OK. Here’s the quote that started this post, and hopefully conveys the message that I’ve been building to:
“From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent,” Arrowsmith said. “But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance.” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35618526/ )
The moral of the story is: It may feel like the apocalypse is unfolding before your very eyes, because you are trying to drink from the Amazon river of information that has always been there, but had been coming to you in a nice convenient 12 oz container. Keep a healthy perspective, and enjoy our ever changing world!