Information Pyramid

By I.J. Hudson

I apologize for the title. I simply couldn’t come up with anything else.  

This is simply a personal story that illustrates how technology has shifted where we go first for information  -  nothing more; nothing less.

I’ve written before that my 85 year-old father-in-law picked up an iPad2 and is having a ball.  He’s looking at old things in a new way.  He’s searching and finding information about World War II that he talked about before.  But now he is finding a lot of detail about it on the Internet, and even providing detail that is NOT on the Internet (more later).   He’s also doing something that  young people started doing a long time ago – looking at his mobile phone for the TIME – not at his watch.

Some of you may know that I was a reporter for more than three decades, and covered forward-looking technology for several years at a TV station in Washington, DC.  It was fun to go to work every day, learn a lot of new stuff, write about it and go home with a smile on my face.  And while I embrace new technology, I do so only when it really makes sense for ME.  

Occasionally, I have a moment when things that have been “out there” are brought into sharp focus.  Here’s my case in point:

Situation:  my daughter is driving her kids to my place to see their great-grandfather and calls at 8AM to say traffic isn’t moving, and could I go online to find out what’s going on.  Sure!  Where did I start?  Google.  Wrong choice!   

 Slap me around a bit ---- I quickly put myself in the shoes of someone caught in that traffic jam – Twitter screamed at me.  I searched Twitter for I-77 and found several tweets related to the crash causing the traffic jam.  I checked all of the folks tweeting and found a TV station tweeting  the information, and went to their homepage to get more detail.  Then I relayed that to my daughter.

All of this was a quick reminder about the pyramid of information that starts with the individual – either tweeting or re-tweeting information, then moving down the pyramid to a source among the tweeters that is likely to have more information.  Individual tweeters, in  their cars,  know that something has happened, can describe where and what it looks like.  But an established news organization has the resources and the credentials to find out and share more detail from the troopers/Public Information Officer on the scene. 

IMHO Twitter is a great resource for basic information; context is a different layer of the onion.  For basic information ----- I now start with Twitter.