Quake News: The Generation Gap

Kevin Maney writes: OK, so when the the LA quake hits, this one woman is right in the middle of things at her Ob/Gyn, and the first thing she thinks of doing is Twittering about it?

Twitter is getting a lot of attention for its role yesterday as a real-time, real-people news news feed during earthquake in Los Angeles. The interesting thing, though, is that for a few million Twitter users, almost entirely under the age of probably 27, this was business as usual. Of COURSE you'd Twitter your friends during a natural disaster. Yet to most people in older generations, that just seems bizarre.

I bet that, in a very broad way, you could draw generational lines around the way people looked for news about the quake and got in touch with loved ones. Younger folks went for their cell phone keypads first -- Twittering and texting. Which, by the way, is a really good thing -- those services take up minimal bandwidth and are less likely to go down in a disaster.

That generation's parents probably made a call on their cells, then turned to e-mail and some news source on the Web.

That generation's parents probably picked up a landline phone to call and turned on the TV.

If there's anyone still around who was born in the 19th century, they probably waited for this morning's paper and mailed a letter...