hippytowiki

Communal Living

I'm moving "off the farm.  " I decided to stop getting Twitter alerts on my cell.  The reasons behind it paralleled my decision in 1975 to leave Xanadu, my commune-like co-op residence at the University of Michigan and move into my own "pad."

I truly love social contact, group experiences, shared information, observations and emotions.  But too much human contact can be tiring and (dare I say it) annoying at times.

After leaving my phone off for several hours one day this week, I turned it back on to find 18 new "tweets," mostly related to people's food consumption, local driving/walking patterns, and other day-to-day routines.  Devoid of visual images, facial expressions, voice inflection, or vivid descriptions, these "shared experiences" were distilled to just a handful of characters (140 to be exact).

Post-Xanadu, I continued to attend parties, entertain late night guests, and indulge in long stretches of music, drinking, eating, sharing stories, and mindless conversation. 

Post-Twitterphone, I'll continue to read about my friends' lives on the web, through their blogs, via e-mail and maybe I'll even see some of them "in the real world" from time to time.  But, for right now, I need my space.

Oh yes, and tonight I'm probably going to have a salad and chicken for dinner.

Tonight, We Have a Really Big Shew!

Ed Sullivan, the favorite Sunday night entertainment source of my generation is long gone, but you can still see the presentation I gave at Podcamp NYC, relating "old entertainment" to "new media."

My Mother Invented Twitter

  (No, she didn't really.) 

But my mother used to always ask me when I left the house, "Where are you going and can you leave a phone number?"  She then would wait up for me to come home (usually at some ridiculous hour of the night) and ask me what I did, who I was with, what I ate, and a myriad of other well-meaning but often annoying questions.  She would knock on my door when it was closed and ask me "what are you doing?"  She still calls me every Sunday night, with similar queries about my activities.

Twitter (which I discovered via Howard Greenstein at Podcamp NYC) is an updated version of my mother's system.  It enables friends, wanna-be friends, acquaintances, and loved ones to share the answer to the simple question, "What are you doing right now?"  I've been a member of the "Twitterati" for about a week now, and the jury's still out.  Unlike my mother's interrogations, Twitter does enable you to easily decide when and what you want to share.  It can be as intrusive as you allow it to be.  It's somewhat addictive.  I don't really care what my new "friends" eat for breakfast, yet I find myself reading...and twittering back with my own mundane activities.

Is this all just a manifestation of the overpowering human need to connect?  Is it a form of voyeurism?  Or is my mother REALLY the force behind Twitter? 

Do you Twitter?  Why?

follow theonswitch at http://twitter.com

A blog community is NOT the same as Woodstock

I still own a felt tip pen.  (I own many, in fact.)  I have my entire high school album collection and even once saw the Dead live in concert.  I used to watch The Ed Sullivan show religiously (and loved the spinning plate guy).

But I also blog, attend events like PodCamp and PostieCon and keep my entire life's activities on a PDA.  I am now a closet reality TV junkie.

I don't miss much about "the old days," however I worry about the depersonalization of communication.  All five senses are meant to be used.  Mouths, hands, ears and feet may all soon become vestigial body parts -- or simply evolve in strange ways to accomodate electronic devices.

Some cases in point:

• I attended a blogging conference recently where my table-mates didn't talk to each other at first because they were busy blogging (ironically, about the event we were all attending together).
• Over the past four years, clients and freelancers I worked with chose to deliver bad news via text messages or cell phone voice mail.
• My team and I will often send each other e-mails rather than get up from our chairs and walk 15 feet to talk to each other.
• Just notice how many people sit in public places together wearing ear buds.

This space is not intended to be the contemporary equivalent of "In my day, we used to trudge through 4 feet of snow to a one-room schoolhouse to write with coal."  It's simply designed to start a lively dialog about how we can start to integrate some timeless principles and lessons into the "new media" world. 

What (or who) do YOU miss most? 

What were you happy to bury along with your Nehru jacket?

Blog on! (and Peace!)