Disturbance in the Force
I’ve taken a few days to reflect a bit on my last posting and the flow of comments that it has generated both in the blogosphere and in a wave of email. Questions about the intrusiveness of this technology are certainly valid. It can be a very rude system that demands attention whenever someone you follow refills their coffee cup or makes a trip to the latrine if they decide to “share” that information.
The overload of information, especially frivolous and useless data, bombarding us from all angles can be powerfully discomforting.
From television “news” stories about things that will never have even the slightest impact on our lives, to perpetual cell phone chatting, and instant messaging, we very often find ourselves suffering from worthless info overload.
Perhaps Pfizer should consider a pill for that?
But the reality of all that suffering doesn’t have much impact on the continuing stream of consciousness. As social networks evolve they will become a useful and important part of all our lives.
Twitter is but one crude user tool in a vast stream. These kinds of applications are here today and gone tomorrow — but the technology pushes ahead. I see a future where many additional tools will surface that will filter the stream of seemingly random noise and that’s when things will get really interesting.
Social networking will elevate our status from consumer to prosumer.
Think about it, anything that you could possibly be interested in will have no doubt been discussed (ad nauseum) in the “stream”. The ability to tap that matrix of human knowledge in order to make well-reasoned decisions about everything from shampoo to automobile and from hobby to health, will provide significant advantage.
With instant and ubiquitous communication the herd will migrate to the refueling stations with the best prices at that moment, the food suppliers with the freshest fruit, and the coffee shop with the creamiest Chai Latte.
You get the picture. To the marketer we will appear as a tremendous school of fish all traveling in a single direction when suddenly, based on some new transmitted data in the stream, we all elegantly veer off in perfect unison to the next destination.
It’s the age-old concept of information at your fingertips — except on steroids.
The old prospectors used to sift the waters of California streams in the hopes of finding a few morsels of gold. No doubt tons of worthless rubble was sifted and abandoned in their search, but it was deemed well worth the effort for a few glints of gold.
In precisely the same way, we will have to sift through a lot of worthless rubble (and silly Twitter postings) in order to mine the precious bits and pieces of information that add value to the human experience. But our tools and methods for mining data are several orders of magnitude greater than that of the 49ers.
No one has to Twitter — or use an ATM machine – or travel on an airplane – or communicate via radio — technology is perfectly content to march forward with or without those who choose to ignore it.
73 de Jeff
May 14th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I like your analogy about panning for gold. The problem to me is that it seems that each twitter-er (I know there’s a better word for that) is like a separate stream. If I stop following someone because 95% of their stream is of the mundane “woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head” variety, but 5% is really interesting stuff, I hate to remove them from the list of people that I’m following. However, that’s what I’ve started to do to reduce the information overload that you talk about.
I typically start following folks on Twitter after reading a tweet or two that seems interesting, and for some of those folks, the stream mostly continues to pan out. (Pun intended.) But I don’t have the time or patience to go through 30 or 40 posts a day from some folks just to get the one nugget of gold. Search tools only do so much to help. If I’m interested in DX, just filtering for tweets that say “DX” isn’t going to be the solution, though it might find new folks to follow.
I’m still very much in the experimental phase, and I really liked the analogy presented in a comment to your previous posting that says experimentation is a very big part of ham radio. It’ll be interesting to see if this technology becomes a permanent part of society.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I couldn’t agree more with you David. But the big point is to be aware of the technology and learn about it. I think that can be done without ever opening a Twitter account. In the future, Twitter or something like it, will allow you to “follow” bots instead of individual people. Those bots will be the result of some search algorithm technology. So the entire river of data will be parsed and diced and you will follow a ’school of thought’ instead of individual people. Something like, “best deals on new Icom HF gear”, or “how to roast your own coffee” — and whenever a bot finds data that matches your criteria it will be routed to you… You will choose if you want it to interrupt you or just stay in a queue until you have time to look through it.
I’m much to pessimistic to play the role of ‘futurist’, but this one seems easy to predict! :-)
73 de Jeff
May 15th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Very interesting reflection Jeff,
I think social networks and tools like twitter behind a “useless facade” hide a powerful potential, as you told, we can finally by-pass traditional one way media (tv, radio broadcast, news papers) and share information instantly. Of course, we have to learn how to find “golden” information in this huge sea of informations. The power is that nothing is filtered, and everyone can access everything.
73,
IZ1KSW
May 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
After dorking around with Twitter for a few days, I have it in the “useful, but crude” category. There is a powerful idea here but it needs to evolve to a higher plain. (Perhaps more sophisticated filtering and control?) Back to tweeting…
73, Bob K0NR
http://twitter.com/robtwitte
May 17th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I too have tried Twitter. I like it. WIthout much analysis it appears to be 75-80% pure noise and the rest pure FUN. For my part, I’m going to be an occasional “Twitterer” who strives to be relevant or interesting.
All that said, K9ZW’s Dayton stream was fun. Hell I thought I was there with him. So I can see the occasional Event based Twittersphere that has more value than daily doings.
Thanks to David (K2DBK) for the Sgt. Pepper’s lyric. I found myseld humming that tune by the end of his post.
Cheers,
mike/wa4d
May 17th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Mike/WA4D,
Boy, I’m sure glad that someone noticed that!
73,
David, K2DBK
P.S. I’m enjoying K9ZW’s twitter stream as well