Francisco Caceres for TIME
My latest column in the print TIME magazine, is a bit of a what-I-did-on-my-winter-vacation essay: trying to figure out how or if I could drive home from Michigan to poorly-plowed Brooklyn after the blizzard, I turned to Twitter to get extreme micronews about the block-by-block situation on the ground. My conclusion? The old insult that “social media is the CB radio of today” is, in fact, a compliment:
Sure, for most polyester-clad hobbyists with CBs in their living rooms, the radios were essentially electronic pet rocks. But for truckers in the pre-GPS, pre-cell-phone era, CB was very useful: it was an ad hoc micro-news network. Drivers on a stretch of highway could share word about gas availability during the energy crisis or speed traps in the days of the 55 m.p.h. (about 90 km/h) limit. No one made them do it; there was no payoff except karma and the feeling of connectedness on a lonely job. And as each traveler went his or her separate way, this news network would dissolve and new ones would form along another stretch of road.
Today social media put us all on the same road…