I was talking to a friend recently and realized something. If I draw the latency between a specific event happening and me learning about it, here is a line that most everybody is certainly capable of relating to.
In detail, I learned about ....
- 1989: ... the fall of the Berlin wall a day late on National News
- 1991: ... the soviet coup about 12 hours into it on CNN
- 1995: ... the Oklahoma City bombing two hours late while opening a session on Mosaic on the CNN site.
- 2001: ... the first strike on 9/11 on the phone half an hour late and then about the other unfolding events on F***company.com. At that point the latency decreased by an order of magnitude.
- 2003: ... Columbia's demise within 10 minutes on the web.
- 2011: .... the recent Earthquake in Virginia before the wave hit me thousand miles away from a tweet.
Looking back, I realized that TV had not been a valuable source of information since 1991 not 2000 like I initially thought. Information now comes directly from sources whose judgement I value some call it the filter bubble but I am not sure. This direct feed into the news still allows differentiation as I cast different level of confidence to every channels. The further away from Twitter, the more the information looks like part of an elaborate theater and packaged. I have also noticed that making sense of these information feeds is enabled through the channel it is originating from: The channel is the context.
Liked this entry ? subscribe to the Nuit Blanche feed, there's more where that came from
No comments:
Post a Comment