#information stream

As we sit in the crawl space under the stairwell in a Texas home, the three full grown men and two women were fetal position with a glass of wine or a beer in their hand.  No, this isn’t some cruel ritualistic fraternity hazing agenda.  We were literally compelled from the couch in our living room the “safest” room in the house which happens to be about 5 feet deep and 3 feet wide.  Tornado warnings are no joke.  Having been in the state of Texas residentially for the 2 weeks, I’ve seen more rampant storms than my previous years of life combined.  Needless to say, Southern California and Arizona does not see its share of weather.

Anyway, as we sit their cramped and relatively unconcerned, I took it upon myself to risk life and limb (no so much, or any at all) to casually walk into the living room to grab my computer… and a fresh beer.  Being somewhat in the weatherman’s digitally generated storm path, their color coding ranged from green to black in severity of the storm with green being least and black being most.  Speaking with my uncle, a lifelong Texas native, he had said that he’d never seen black before.  Needless to say, we were in the path of the black digital funnel cloud!

With my laptop in hand, I considered my options for connectivity to not only to track the weather but also watch the Bulls vs. Heat.  I’ll preface by saying that I continuously try to express to my 60+ year old uncle the concept of social media and although he usually responds with an expression of understanding, I can tell that the gears aren’t fully turning.  I decided to conduct an experiment to gather empirical evidence proving to my Uncle the value instantaneous connectivity and information provided on TWITTER! 

“What’s ‘Tweeter’ going to tell us about the weather?” he responds.  After logging on, I searched key terms such as ‘Tornados,’ ‘Funnel Clouds,’ ‘Storms,’ ‘Dallas,’ etc.  Then began following as many weather service handles, storm chasers, and any handle that has Tweeted something including those key terms with or without links attached.  I created a list to view all of them together as they continued to respond with pictures and updates on funnel cloud sightings and locations. 

It became an informational war between TV and Internet as we were able to return to the living room television to gather updates.  The next and final battle occurred as we sat, my computer still in hand, to watch the weatherman on the evening news.  I was armed with weather.com’s live, up to the second, tracker and Twitter.  Uncle was armed with the TV weatherman.  Needless again to say, I was reporting the news minutes before the TV was able to relay the message much to the intrigue of Uncle. 

Game, Set, Match.  Another converted soul.