Catastrophies and Technology
I was working out on Mike’s farm in Wisconsin yesterday, and it wasn’t until I got into the car for the ride home at about 7:00pm that I turned on the radio and first heard about the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. For those of you on the East Coast, our I-35 here is like your I-95. It’s the major north-south highway that everyone uses to get everywhere. When the highway was built, both Minneapolis and St. Paul wanted I-35 to go through their city — and bring with it the associated business. So I-35 splits south of the Twin Cities, and becomes two highways. One, called I-35W goes through Minneapolis, and the other, I-35E, goes through St. Paul. They then join up again north of the Twin Cities. (Note: That ‘W’ and that ‘E’ are NEVER pronounced “west” or “east”; they’re always just ‘W’ and ‘E’ as if they didn’t stand for anything. On traffic reports, for example, you’d hear, “traffic on I-35W northbound is stopped for an auto accident.”)
Anyway, so I got home and found that, like on September 11, 2001 in New York and D.C., the phone system sucked. Cell phone calls were hopeless, as I’d been hearing on the radio, but land line calls weren’t likely to get through either. We received a couple long-distance calls, but couldn’t call back out. It occurred to me then that if one had an Internet phone, say one attached to Skype or Vonage or another provider, it would probably be no issue to call out. This struck me as particularly ironic, since one of the major stumbling blocks to adopting Internet telephony initially had been the difficulty of incorporating a 911 system. Yet when a catastrophe struck people needed to contact one another, it was the traditional phone system that failed, and the poo-pooed Internet phone that allowed for communication.
Following the news about the bridge has also been interesting. Much more so now than six years ago, the news media are all imploring the public to send eyewitness accounts, pictures, and videos to them. In the dawning of the citizen-journalist age it’s interesting to note that it’s both quick and easy for the public to send their content directly to a major news outlet. And at the same time, the news media needs that video footage and those pictures to put on their Internet sites, in order to provide instant news. Newspapers, for instance no longer have the luxury of putting together a news story for the next day’s paper; it has to be now, now. Radio needs pictures and video as much as T.V. does.
Now, the day after, Twin Cities residents are all checking up on their friends and colleagues, to make sure everyone’s okay. Friends from away have been sending me emails to that effect. One local friend sent an email last night to a bunch of us, requesting that we all mass-email one another so that we all knew that everyone was all right. That seemed awkward. No one did. This morning I wondered how this physical real-life event was affecting the local online community. As I fence with a number of high-school students, I’ve come to understand that a large part of their social world occurs online now. So I signed up for several social networking sites, the most used by my circle of friends being Facebook. On Facebook, a number of groups have already been created surrounding the collapse of the bridge, with hundreds of members posting prayers and notices there. More interesting, I think, is the use of the Status function.
If you’ve never been on Facebook, let me explain. Like most social network sites, there is the ability to connect with friends in a real-time way, as well as to post messages to be picked up later. The site combines the functions of email, instant messaging, newsgrouping, blogging, and so forth. In Facebook, there’s a function called “Status” that allows you to write something about yourself that will then display to all your friends. It always begins with “[your name] is…” And so, for example, if I look at my Facebook page I’ll see that “Susie is heading north.” and “Sarah is swamped.” and “Madi is feeling Santana’s pain.” At first I thought it was kinda silly, and often it is (”Ella is ughhhhhhahhhhhhhhhahaha.”), but I came to realize that these little tidbits of day-to-day life allow one to stay in touch with distant friends in a closer way than by email. By email, usually the contact is so infrequent (yearly, for instance) that the email is lengthy and covers the major things that have happened, without any detail. So you learn that your friend has moved, has passed the bar, has had an enjoyable trip to Brazil. But you don’t ever hear about the details or the emotion of say, foregoing all other normal life in order to study for the bar. By “Status” messages, today I learn that Ilana got a new laptop, a couple of my local high school-aged friends are visiting colleges, and Jon is “starting to lose that law library pallor.” What’s really neat is that today I can also see at a glance that all my friends and colleagues who are on Facebook were not on the bridge — because they updated their statuses to say so. Now that seems like a much more efficient method of communication than a million emails.
November 21st, 2007 at 7:57 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Catastrophies and Technology, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.