Thanks to Phil Barber of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat for including me in a piece about how new and social media helped trigger the events we saw today.

Barber writes:

If this were 1984 or 1994 or maybe even 2004, Sterling’s cringe-inducing words never would have made it to public ears, and he would have been sitting courtside at Oracle Arena in Oakland for Game 4 on Sunday. Thanks to the Internet and social media platforms and the ubiquity of hand-held computers, he became the biggest story of the weekend, and the groundswell of sentiment against him may be too massive to withstand.

And my quotes:

“It came out Saturday, right?” Ed Sherman, who writes about sports media at his site ShermanReport.com, said of the Sterling story. “So then boom, it’s on ESPN the whole day. Then you’ve got TNT (basketball coverage), and those guys get to weigh in, and then all that stuff gets posted … via either social media or YouTube. It all kind of feeds on itself, and you’ve got this big boulder that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it’s rolling right toward Sterling.”

And…

“I wish I had a dime for every time I heard the word ‘allegedly’ in the last two days,” Sherman said. “I’d make a lot of money. (Sports commentator) Stephen A. Smith was on George Stephanopoulos yesterday, and it was just amazing. He’s railing on about this guy, and then every fourth word he had to throw in ‘allegedly.’ ”

There’s also this observation:

“I spend a lot of time discussing what’s wrong with social media, what we shouldn’t be doing, best practices,” said Kerry Rego, a Santa Rosa-based social media consultant, author and instructor. “But I’m a hopeful person, and when I see something amazing and wonderful that social media is a big part of, I spend much of my time discussing that to inspire people in what can be done. Yes, everybody takes photos of their coffee and takes selfies, but they also can change the world with these tools.”

It definitely changed Sterling’s life.