Seriously. Ten years from now, we're all going to be zooming around in our little rocketship cars, cheerfully communicating telepathically about how crazy the olden days were, via cerebral implants.
You might be thinking "Come on Derek, Only ten years??" Ok, admittedly, it's a stretch. But, the point remains: The world will be a very different place in no time at all, and I'm not talking “Obama change” either. President Obama could only dream about the power of the real change that's coming- which can be summed up in a single word.
Tweets.
Tweets are messages consisting of 140 characters or less that followers of twitter.com use to as an answer to a simple question. "What are you doing?" To most, the mundanity of the scenario is a little hard to swallow. I’ll admit it. I thought it. Why would I care about what perfect strangers are doing? Well, In the past 5 days I have become a zealot. I have told everyone I know about Twitter, and most peoples' response involves a puzzled looking face, or long periods of confusion filled silence on the phone, after which people will all invariably say "....that's it??"
YES! That IS it! But that's the amazing thing! That's all there is to it. You don't have to worry about managing your profile, or chatting/avoiding people that are online. You don't have to worry about any of the frilly issues that complicate sites like Myspace and, to a lesser degree, Facebook. Let me put it this way, I never knew how much I cared about what perfect strangers are doing in their lives until I started my twitter account. Now, I can't get enough of it. It's the current internet Heroine.
Maybe this is because I'm a big proponent of any and all things viral, and I think the growth of such sites/trends/movements is a fascinating study. Or, maybe it's because I am really stoked about where I see this taking us as a nation and as a world. Let's think about it, one bit at a time.
Remember back 20 years ago when a personal computer was as rare a possession as a functional 8 track player is today? Those were the days in which your world consisted of a precious handful of places and people, and your ability to expand it was limited to a select handful of channels. You went to work, came home, only talked to people you knew on the telephone, which probably had a 26 foot coiled wire so you could walk around more of the house with a vague delusion of freedom. There were always places in the house that you could BARELY reach with that phone to your face. I remember at our home in Idaho, back in the corded phone days, I could JUST reach the front door and still be on the phone at the same time. Anyhow, if you wanted to reach someone you didn't know (which, why the hell would you?) you would have to look ‘em up in the white pages. Even if you did, you always had to have a good reason. Calling someone out of the blue just to meet a stranger would have been, like, the absolute pinnacle of unorthodoxy. If you wanted to learn anything, you either went to college or to the public library and committed yourself to pouring over numerous volumes in order to gather the specific information that you were in search of. Our worlds were small, and the channels to share ideas, and meet new people were either smaller still, or nonexistent entirely. Networking was done face to face, no buts about it. That was just the way of things.
Now think about today.
Everyone is connected to everyone else. People are now, literally, a part of the internet. We all have blogs or Facebook pages. We all carry "mobile devices" that can access any information we want about any subject from practically anywhere. We won’t even do these wonderful pieces of technology the injustice of calling them simply a "cell phone" anymore. That would just be demeaning, and inaccurate. Besides, It’s rude to talk down to our loved ones, or call them names.
As those of you who know me are aware, I am a big proponent of the iPhone. With it, at any moment of the day, I am 20 seconds away from an article on the industrial revolution, pictures of Versailles, a map and contact info for the nearest sushi bar, any social networking site, and a plethora of extremely useful apps. We are equipped with more information than any of us today even realize, and the amazing thing is that we hardly understand (as a whole) where these paths can take us. In fact, the trailblazing is happening right now. A day doesn't pass without someone out there, from the infinite, creative depths of a hive mind, (which, like it or not, we're all a part of now) coming up with a never-before-thought-of application for these avenues, which will bring even more people together that would never have networked otherwise. People are connecting today (as in right this second) who are coming up with creative, innovative solutions to the common problems presented to us, courtesy of life in the 21st century. Even if you don't understand it now, the power of something like twitter is titanic. So much so, that it cannot really even be measured, because the results are arbitrary, and difficult to quantify. However, within a few weeks, or months, or a year, your life will be affected by a random idea that began as a tweet between two utter strangers that progressed to open communication, then to real life conversation, then was brought to fruition. Archimedes, in his famous quote, spoke of a lever long enough, and a fulcrum strong enough to move the world. I can’t imagine that 140 keystrokes, and the resources of millions upon millions of people were the lever and fulcrum he envisioned, but that doesn’t change what they are.
So, yeah, I know that space cars and internally implanted communication devices are pretty far fetched by today’s standards, but how much of today’s reality would have sounded like science fiction in 1989? 1995? Even 2000? The thing that is perhaps the most exciting (and the most scary) is that the connectivity that we are experiencing with each other is expanding at a never before seen, exponential rate. It’s only a matter of time before the designer of a flying car propulsion system tweets someone with the resources and motivation to invest in it. Right then and there, the next Thomas Edison will be born. This is certainly not limited to technological development, and there are pros and cons. There will be those who organize charitable efforts as a result of their tweeting, and there will be those who advance their radical, even potentially terrorist agendas. And, like it or not, this is the world in which we are now living- where a simple 140 character tweet has the potential to set things in motion that can change the world. However, I take some comfort in knowing that, we’re all in this together. The funny thing is that we don’t even have a choice in the matter.
