On the fault line of news: Shaking it up with the internet
“Honey, are we having an earthquake?”
When I spoke those words to my wife early Thursday morning, I was half asleep. I wasn’t quite convinced that the 15 seconds of rumbling I had just felt was anything other than an 18-wheeler rolling through the neighborhood.
Confusing matters even more, a train whistle pierced the night, and I sleepily reassured myself that the vibration all around me was caused by a locomotive rattling the windows. After all, I lived across the street from a major railroad line in Waldwick, New Jersey, when I was 5, and our whole apartment had shuddered whenever a train came through. Only problem is that despite the whistle I had heard, the nearest track to my house in Kalispell is about five blocks away.
Nope, tweren’t a railroad.
So when my wife agreed with me that it was indeed an earthquake, I did what any red-blooded newsman would do, I picked up my cellphone and Googled it: “USGS earthquake Montana.”
Nothing turned up for that search, but it was probably just a minute since the quake had ended. The U.S. Geological Survey is quick, but not that quick.
However, when I looked back at my phone screen, I noticed that there were a bunch of tweets coming up on my search from fellow insomniacs who wanted to share their own thoughts about being roughed up by Mother Earth. I clicked on one, and got a whole long line of them. They were from all over — Butte, Helena, Spokane, Boise, Calgary. It was obvious that this was a big one, so I jumped into high gear and started composing my own post for the Inter Lake’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.
I got a note on Facebook relatively quickly, and asked people to share their experiences and thoughts about the earthquake. By the time I finished posting a similar message to Twitter a minute later, I had three dozen responses on Facebook! Talk about spreading like wildfire!
“Ferndale. Shook my whole house. Woke me up.”
“In Eureka, rocking house back and forth.”
“Shook us good in Kalispell.”
“Our couch, TV and lights were moving in Columbia Falls.
“In Bozeman, house wiggled for 30 seconds…”
“Felt it in Cheney, WA. Not bad. Almost mistaked it for the laundry.”
Oh yeah, those washing machines can rattle pretty good when they get off balance, but I don’t think one of them can quite compete with a 5.8 magnitude earthquake!
The good news seems to be that there was no major damage from the quake, which was centered just south of Lincoln, Montana, and so far as we know at this time, caused no deaths or major injuries.
That’s very good news indeed, considering that 5.8 is at the very top end of the scale for a moderate earthquake. When you get above a 6 on the scale, you are talking about a strong earthquake, which can cause damage even to well-built structures.
I’ll remember that quake for a long time, but for me the bigger lesson was watching just how much the internet has changed our lives, our way of sharing news and our way of building community. Twitter and Facebook are the modern-day equivalent of “Kilroy was here” — a way for each of us to leave our mark — however transitory — on the world at large.
Whether it’s a geological tremor or a political fight, the news is at out fingertips — literally. Used to be you would at least need to sit down at your desktop computer to weigh in, but not anymore. Our cellphone is now the appendage that plugs us into the matrix wherever we are. Now that is a real earthquake!
(Next week, I’ll rerun a column from 10 years ago when the internet and I were young, sharing some thoughts about the drive to digitize. I still think newspapers are well-positioned to last into the foreseeable future, whether on paper or a liquid crystal display.)