The East Coast woke up under a blanket of snow this weekend and
collectively documented the experience on the myriad social and mobile
inventions of the past decade. Facebook, Twitter and other technologies
make it increasingly difficult to stay isolated -even if you're stuck
home alone.
"The funny thing is that I actually checked my Instagram
feed before I even looked out my own window," says Eric Witz, who lives
in Medford, Mass.
On Saturday, Witz posted a photo of his car
stuck under a "6-foot-high snow drift". "I always have my phone on me.
So checking these things is something I do instinctively when I wake
up," he says. "That probably makes me a sad social media cliche, but
it's the truth."
As Northeasterners posted photo after photo of
kids sledding in Central Park and suburbanites conquering Mt. Snowmore
with their shovels, West Coast wags teased with tweets of sunshine and
snapshots of palm trees.
Call it what you will, The Hashtag
Snowstorm, the latest Snowpocalypse or Snowtorious B.I.G. The weekend
whiteout was a lifetime away from the blizzard of 1978, a world not just
without social media but one devoid of endless Weather Channel warnings
and the lifeline of mobile phones. Even the last two years have upended
the way we receive information. We've moved from text to photos and
videos taken on smart phones and we can't let go.
Kathy Tracy was
in junior high school when that famous snowstorm hit Westhaven, Conn.,
35 years ago. She still lives there today and some things haven't
changed. Snow is still snow, and people still wait for the streets to be
cleared, hoping there is enough food and toilet paper to get by.
"The
roads were so bad that my father and I took a sled and walked two miles
to the grocery store," says Tracy recalling the '78 storm that left as
much as 27 inches of snow on the Northeast.
Getting updates of the
'78 blizzard meant turning on the radio or watching evening news
programs. This weekend, Tracy says she turned to Twitter and nonstop
news coverage to stay informed. She also follows a meteorologist on
Facebook and receives updates from CNN, The Wall Street Journal and
other news outlets.
While Tracy talked with a reporter on the
telephone on Sunday, she was still waiting for plow trucks to clear the
three feet of snow the storm heaped on her neighborhood. But the
information at the tips of her fingers made being stuck at home somewhat
more tolerable.
"I guess what's better is that you are not
sitting here waiting for the 6 o'clock news, waiting to find out what's
going on," she says.
Still, no matter what century you live in, there are few cures for cabin fever.
"You still have to deal with waiting for the plow," Tracy says.
As
people across the Northeast awaited plow trucks, looked for flights to
resume or simply tried to kill time as the storm passed, they plucked
away on their smartphones and tablet computers to document just about
every inch of the snowfall. On Facebook, mentions of the word snow
jumped 15-fold from earlier in the week, the company says, though it did
not give specific numbers. On Sunday, one of the most-used terms in
status updates was "no school tomorrow" as students rejoiced and parents
shared updates with one another.
On Instagram, people used the
hashtag "Nemo" (the Weather Channel's unofficial name for the storm)
583,641 times in describing their photos as of Sunday afternoon
according to Venueseen, a company that helps businesses track marketing
campaigns on Instagram. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing site is where
Witz posted a photo that his sister sent him from Hamden, Conn., one of
the hardest-hit areas with 40 feet of snow.
"I like Instagram
because it gives you a more personal, immediate sense of peoples'
experiences in real time," he says. "I'm one of the weird few people who
actually enjoy seeing what people in the world are eating and
drinking."
It's easy to be nostalgic about how much things have
changed since the blizzard of '78 when it comes to the speed of
information and how it's consumed. But the changes continue.
"What
really struck me this time around, and with (Superstorm) Sandy too, is
not so much that people were sharing information, but that they were
sharing photos and video," says Steve Jones, a professor who studies
online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. "You get a different perspective than you could from just
words."
Indeed, says Ranvir Gujral, the co-founder of Chute, a San
Francisco startup that helps companies put user-generated content on
their websites and mobile apps, "we are in the midst of a visual
revolution."
The San Francisco company worked with NBC to launch
Stormgrams, a site where people can share Instagram photos of the storm
using a common hashtag. The photos are organized by location, laid out
on a "heat map" that paints the most actively sharing states red.
Countless
mobile apps encourage photo-taking, Gujral says, adding that a big
reason there is so much thirst online for the endless stream of photos
is because there has never been a bigger supply of it.
So what's
lost in this endless stream of snow-updates, Instagram photos and
Facebook news Serendipity, Jones says. Running into people and sharing a
moment -offline- while events are unfolding.