Tiger Woods, my Father and the future of News.

It happened last Friday, around 12 o'clock, right before lunch, I checked my twitter feed and saw that is when I saw it. "Tiger Woods in critical condition after car accident at 2:30 am." Just like everybody I was shocked by this news and immediately shared it with my father, who I was enjoying a post-Thanksgiving lunch with, "Tiger's been in an accident." "What?" He said, shaking his head. In his usual, shameful, where has society gone voice. My father has never been a huge sports fan like me and my brother, however he knows the big names and it is hard NOT to know Tiger Woods' name. Now I am bringing this all up in reflection to last Tuesday's blog. My father after reading it Tuesday, commented, what are we turning into? Are we just electrical pulses that spew random bits of information, like gears in a cog? Well, I argue no. Social Media is allowing us more individual freedom and it is allowing us to gain all of the information, that we as individuals want faster and quicker than ever before. Look at the Tiger Woods incident, before the day and age of social networking the story would have hit the 12 o'clock news if we were lucky, or we would have to wait five or six hours to watch it on the nightly news. In those twelve hours a PR "spin team" can come up with a number of excuses and false stories for Tiger Woods, "well he was off to get some milk for his baby." Now it is not my purpose here to judge Tiger Woods, however it is my part to react to how fast this story broke, using social networking. Like I said earlier, I did not hear about this story from the newspaper or TV, I simply like thousands of others found out about this story from my Twitter Feed and no not from the New York Times Twitter feed, but from fantasy sports analyst Mattew Berry(@MattewBerryTMR) who simply tweeted the breaking story, to his followers. I cannot help but wonder what would of happened, if we had this technology during the OJ case, or even going further back, what if Bernstien and Woodward had a twitter account? Would Bernstein have tweeted DeepThroat's words, to the populace? Can you imagine news breaking in an instant? And not just news, but opinions, thoughts, emotions all breaking the minute that they are conjured up, because this is the that society we now live in The day of getting news the old fashioned way is gone. Billions upon billons of newspapers are losing money as more and more people are turning to the Internet for their news, and that is now even changing with social networking. Before the newspaper where did we get our news? It was from word of mouth and twitter/facebook and various other social networking applications are simply adding to that. Do you remember the family reunion, when your family use to sit around and tell stories about what they had been up to and all the crazy hijinks that happened in their personal lives. Well that part of our lives is simply gone. Change a job? Update your Facebook status. Have baby pictures? Upload them to Flicker or PhotoBucket. News and information is not changing us, it is becoming more of a reflection of us as a whole, as a society. True, we have to straddle that line on how much information we want the the world to have access to, and that very line seems to change everday, but at the end of the day in the Social Media any information you want is there.