Mount St. Helens and the Fear of Not Knowing
In the era before cellphones and Twitter, awaiting a looming dark cloud of volcanic ash was full of anxiety and wonder—then the sky turned black.
Yesterday, a Hawaiian volcano thousands of miles away from me erupted violently. Moments later, the phone in my pocket buzzed with an alert, Twitter notified me, friends on Slack pinged me, and within minutes I joined thousands of other curious people across the planet, watching someone livestream the eruption of Kilauea.
The giant stack of technology that our apps and browsers feed on has made this sort of magical instant-sharing so commonplace that immediacy has become our expectation. Geologists in Hawaii on Twitter, responding to requests clamoring for images and video, explaining that they were busy monitoring instruments, which took priority over
