Twitterversed.
Like a lot of people I didn't really understand twitter at first. My pal Danese would talk about it or use it , and I admit I was at a loss. In my mind it was another blogging service only extremely very limited in the 140 character count. Living in the shadow of two large ridges I dont really have cell phone service at home and most of my texting experience consisted of texting friends while they were in music rehearsals or in studio so I could avoid disturbing them.
The odd thing is that twitter is more like a phone call than a telegraph. The other styles of blogs presented on facebook and myspace and tribe and livejournal all have a somewhat delayed real time feel. If you are lucky on livejournal and somehow there are enough people together online discussing a subject on the same page you can refresh the page and see what someone else has said fast enough to have a sort of real time conversation. The comments in myspace work similarly, its easy to use them as a way of sort of passing notes on the internet and keeping a conversation going where you are both present and exchanging pleasantries and images and videos and such.
Most blogging sites that allow friends and filters are somewhat slower than this. Sites like tribe.net make up for it with more comprehensive discussion threading than most, sites like facebook make up for it with a real time feed of status updates that mimics twitters immediacy interlaced with apps and games.
Its the immediacy that is compelling first of all in twitter. Eventually I had added enough interesting people to twitter along with my few friends on the service (this was about a year ago) and I started checking in regularly. Admittedly it was the ARG "The Lost Ring" that helped me get excited about the unusualy immediate quality of the posts enough to keep coming back. You have to actually make use of the media to grasp its utility. The use of different media and the constant reaching out from twitter to other blogs and video and even twitpic worked its magic on me. I became a believer after a few months.
The interesting thing is that the conversation is dominated by the sort of wit and brevity that decorated the era of the telegraph. Conversations tend to accrue a sort of long form and a sort of wide scope that is more familiar to poets than entertainers. Twitter for me is also a world embedded in the future that is now, it is rife with brilliant authors and comic book artists and futurists and that makes me feel in good company. I can follow my favorite Open Source evangelists as they hop on and off of planes and share links with lots of sustainability people as well as regularly converse with my childhood best friend in Mauii.
When the Mumbai bombings happened I got a whole other view of the potential of the system. Pretty quickly I found a contact who had direct information, it was very strange to get real time moment to moment reports like blasts and reported sightings of fire and damage, it was also helpful to meet and make a new friend. The use of hashtags as ways of organizing information and conversations really came alive for me during the incident in Mumbai.
Eventually I even got into the habit of following along with special conferences and events using hashtage, like SXSW and other specialized industry talks. Slowly twitter was becoming a sort of newresource for me, and a place where I socialize, and a sort of broadcast station.
Hashtaging means you can slice the stream any way you want to and dip in and follow lots of people that are not on your regular list. It means you can keep project notes for your self and a group of potential collaborators and you can find out immediately what people think of a new movie release. The range of utility of twitter reflects the range of use its human users need from it, and it is ever expanding and ever gaining elegance and amplification.
Really I haven't had traditional "tv" in my house for over six years, although I do occasionally rely on services like CNN. We watch the internet and shows from itunes on our small hd "tv".Originally the Iran election events caught my eye because they carried the #CNNfail hash tag which usually denotes something that they are missing due to incompetence or because they are just ignoring the newsworthy story. All part of the ongoing conversation regarding the emergence of internet media and the slow steady bloat and demise of main stream media and its fixation on consumer culture.
The pattern which I have see before surfaced immediately: the people who had some expertise in the area initially stepped forwards and people who were not familiar with the situation enough to make an immediate contribution stepped back. Personally my connection to some of the students was established very quickly due to real human relational chains of affiliation and human friendship. A nation with so many bloggers as Iran has many friends in the world. My own interest in combing through youtubes and sharing links out to other followers was more based on the agitation I feel when I see the Main Stream Media (or MSM) ignoring a story in a way that actually can shape the outcome of events. Following the students their situation was and is compelling. With a population clearly experiencing the modern bell curve their is huge number of internet savvy youth dominated by a much older population in far less numbers holding power. There will be many political situations like this in the future and many people were watching the outcome because of this emerging statistical reality.
As the students were losing the ability to communicate with each other due to text and internet clamp downs a grim story emerged from their postings to twitter. Initially it seemed like the physics building of the university was being surrounded by Militia known as Basij. A familiar pattern of brutality seemed to be emerging very quickly in a situation that was receiving zero coverage in the MSM. The degradation of the internal infrastructure of the communications systems meant that many people involved in the rapid exchange of twitters were also helping to increase the amount of communication that was happening in Tehran and between the other cities. The soft infrastructure of people creating new ways of gaining access to a signal emerged alongside the task of keeping each other informed, and assuring that the students were not abandoned to an obscure fate. At least until the noise and feedback on the system combined with oprganized efforts to twist the tweets into threats emerged and made us all stop and think again.
Personally my own interest It had absolutely nothing to do with making a judgment about the events that had transpired in Iran, it was simply a desire to try and keep somewhat accurate information flowing emerging. The victory for us was when our own media began to make an effort to report on the students plight.
A strange thing about online communications is that it is difficult to hide cruelty. In a short phrase people come across amazingly accurately. The brutish are brutish, the petty are petty, the brilliant shine brightly.
Watching the footage coming in to youtubes from the ground, the human footage there was an inherent voice in that too. People were making an effort to post videos that showed acts of compassion, moments of profound humanity. For my part as long as people were making an effort to post these sorts of videos I was willing to spend some time finding them and then and re-posting them to my own networks. For me they were news of the human state on the planet.
