Very Very Big

Marathon, FL
No LL

The other day I got a complete surprise from an article in Wired magazine. It said that all the leading bloggers have already abandoned the blog format and have moved over to facebook.com and twitter.com. What! Are they kidding? I've always been a proponent of change, but I've only been blogging for 4 years. I'm not ready for a change. Besides, I'm very satisfied with blogging as a means of communication, and I suspect that my readers are too.

Still, I feel that something very important and very profound is happening with the younger generation and twitter. Twitter is the service that allows you to post short text messages to the twitter service. Each message is called a tweet. Friends and other readers can subscribe to your tweets. All the subscribers will get your message in 1-2 seconds. If you ask a question, and if you have a lot of subscribers, you'll start getting answers in 5-10 seconds. Some people call it microblogging or real-time blogging. You in turn, can subscribe to the tweet feeds of others who interest you. Most tweeters are very young.

The amazing thing about communities of tweeters is that they achieve a collective awareness of what each other are doing and thinking at any particular time. They collaborate on life's problems. Some even collaborate on work assignments. A community of tweeters may take on a consulting assignment or a programming assignment. They contribute collectively to the solution, and somehow share the compensation.

So what's new? When we share company with other people in a room or in an office, we are constantly sharing experiences, and have some idea of what the others are feeling and thinking. The new thing about tweeting is that the sharing can be extended to affinity groups regardless of proximity. Geography doesn't count, therefore the diversity of the circle of participants is much enhanced.

Every time I hear of tweeters I think of ant colonies or bee hives. The tweeters may find entirely new ways to exploit the ingenuity of the human mind. The up side potential is huge.

I think those young people may be on the verge of making a change so overwhelming in importance that it sounds like a new species; a successor to homo sapiens. Let me be the first to suggest a name for the new species: homo aviaries.

Someone else, not me, will no doubt compare tweeters with The Borg. I am also reminded of a influential novel that I enjoyed as a boy; namely Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Childhood's End deals with the theme of a new generation of children abruptly (not gradually) evolving into something unimaginable. I am further reminded of Kurzweil's singularity.

By nature, I am a person who resists hyperbole. I've had a long standing policy of editing my own writing and deleting 2 out of every 3 superlatives I find when reviewing my text. Therefore, I'm embarrassed by the sweeping scope of what I just said. Nevertheless, I stand by the point -- we stand on the threshold of a very profound change. Twitter itself will probably not last but the idea of remote-real-time-microblogging-messaging perhaps will.

Once, I think that I experienced a very slight taste of the collective consciousness a few years back. The company I worked for had its employees split across 4 locations across a big city. I was conducting a negotiation with a vendor in a conference room in a hotel. The negotiation dragged on for months. Other members of my team, couldn't be there the whole time. To remedy that, I kept a conference call on my cell phone open all the time. Others on my team also dialed into this conference call all day long as they went about their regular duties. An bud in one ear listened to the call, while the other ear listened to the conversation in the room. Over time all of us became intimately aware of what the others were doing, where they were, and sometimes what they were thinking on several subjects. Sometimes, a participant would break in with news of current events or daily life. I remember that it did give me a sort of bizarre feeling of heightened situational awareness.

Eager as I am to taste new technology, I don't plan to start tweeting. I am nearly 3 generations removed from those who stand to benefit most. The gap is too big to bridge. Besides, on board Tarwathie we have no cell phone service so often that it wouldn't work well. If you think I'm wrong please let me know.