Friday Protip: The Internet Shrinks Distances, But Not Really

by Sanya Weathers

I posted this in a few places, but it bears repeating: The internet has given us the impression that we live in a very small world. I regularly talk to friends in California, Canada, Germany, England, and Taiwan, even though I live on the East Coast of the USA. There’s no time delay, no sense of distance. I have the same easy rapport with my far-flung friends as I do with my next door neighbor.

However, I don’t know exactly where anyone BUT the next door neighbor lives. Why do I need a street address when I have a [email protected] address?

Well, in the event of a disaster, it turns out a physical location would be nice information to have. Fire in Texas, tornadoes in many places, floods in even more places. We look at pictures of destroyed neighborhoods in Tuscaloosa and we think, wait, our friend lives in Alabama.

But Alabama is a pretty big place. It takes hours to cross it, not the milliseconds it takes to send a text message.

So today’s protip: If you run a community, create spaces for people from affected areas to check in after natural disasters. (Consider posting tweets to your forum and Facebook pages – those offer more durable records than Twitter.) If you are from a state or a country that has been affected by a disaster, please check in – your friends don’t know if you were on the spot or a seven hour drive away, and they’re worried about you.

I hope everyone is okay.