I had one of those moments last night that made me stop and think and realise how much technology has crept up on us and how much we take it for granted.
We were driving over to a friend’s place for dinner (looking up the address from my email into Google Maps in the car on the way) when we hit bad traffic just before the Anzac bridge. Traffic was just stopped for 4 lanes and nothing was moving. We sat there for 40 minutes with the engine off, and I was looking up news sites (news.com.au and SMH) to see what the problem was. Nothing in any newspaper, so I searched Twitter.
We suddenly had our answer, and a pretty gruesome one.
Traffic eventually started crawling to an exit for an alternate route and I used Google Maps to re-map us from our current location to our destination.
It’s interesting using Twitter as an important source of news - especially given that newspapers don’t tend to report on suicide attempts for fear of copycat attempts. No such rules govern social media.
A search this morning on Anzac Bridge in Google News has no reports on anything last night, whereas Twitter has about 10 tweets reporting the closure and the reason. The bridge was shut down for at least 3 hours last night so I’m sure lots of people stuck in traffic were wondering what was going on.
It’s the first time I’ve really found twitter so useful - I know lots of people were twittering about the Hudson river plane crash, etc as it happened but this is the first time it’s become more than an academic interest, given this was something the news couldn’t report on.
It’s funny how location based information has really crept up on us and it’s something I don’t even think twice about. It’s perfectly normal to search for the reason for traffic from my phone, and for my phone to offer alternate routes to getting to my destination - it’s just part of driving now. I don’t think I even have a street directory in the car anymore. I couldn’t have even imagined this 5 years ago.
This post is tagged under: random thoughts, twitter
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You are right about not being able to imagine this five years … or maybe even three years ago. It’s Bladerunner-esque.
It’s true - usually the first source for information. But not always a good thing when it comes to footy games that are on delay or people openly discussing movie endings!