Social media changes snowbound experience
BY BARBARA ORTUTAY AP Technology Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2013
2/17/13 at 3:51 AM
HAMDEN, Conn. (AP) - The East Coast woke up under a blanket of snow last weekend and collectively documented the experience on the myriad social and mobile inventions of the past decade. Facebook, Twitter and other technologies make it increasingly difficult to stay isolated - even if you're stuck home alone.
"The funny thing is that I actually checked my Instagram feed before I even looked out my own window," says Eric Witz, who lives in Medford, Mass.
Witz posted a photo of his car stuck under a "6-foot-high snow drift."
"I always have my phone on me. So checking these things is something I do instinctively when I wake up," he says. "That probably makes me a sad, social-media cliché, but it's the truth."
As people across the Northeast awaited plow trucks, looked for flights to resume or simply tried to kill time as the storm passed, they plucked away on their smartphones and tablet computers to document just about every inch of the snowfall.
On Facebook, mentions of the word "snow" jumped 15-fold from earlier in the week, the company says, though it did not give specific numbers. One of the most-used terms in status updates was "no school tomorrow" as students rejoiced and parents shared updates and even grieved.
By that Sunday afternoon, people on Instagram used the hashtag "Nemo" (the Weather Channel's unofficial name for the storm) 583,641 times in describing their photos, according to Venueseen, a company that helps businesses track marketing campaigns on Instagram.
"What really struck me this time around, and with (superstorm) Sandy too, is not so much that people were sharing information, but that they were sharing photos and video," says Steve Jones, a professor who studies online culture and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You get a different perspective than you could from just words."
Indeed, says Ranvir Gujral, the co-founder of Chute, a San Francisco startup that helps companies put user-generated content on their websites and mobile apps, "we are in the midst of a visual revolution."
Chute worked with NBC to launch Stormgrams, a site where people can share Instagram photos of the storm using a common hashtag. The photos are organized by location, laid out on a "heat map" that paints the most actively sharing states red.
"One thing we haven't overcome is what you do if you don't have electricity or if you are stranded in a car without a cellphone signal," Jones says.
