Thursday 19 July 2007

Hotwired - the life beyond wired.

Besides this "twitter telepathy" that develops after a while, there are a few other consequences of highly wired life that many people are not quite getting yet. We who are hotwired [tm Teddlesruss dat who!] have developed something else that most muggles only dream about: We have become somewhat omniscient.

Where other people are seeing the newscasts once or twice a day and reading their papers, we're there. I can be sitting at coffee and get a twitter SMS (aka a "tweet") telling me that the Mitchell Freeway has just had one direction closed due to an accident and so I'll go home along another route. Do that with your newspaper!

My Google Calendar can reach me with my appointments by SMS, almost anytime anywhere. No hot synching with Outlook or messing about with bluetooth or usb cables. Do that with your diary!

And thanks to some clever work with various RSS tolls, my posting this article will result in a quick tweet being sent to the entire Twitterverse. Do that with your letter to the editor!

Apropos of which, I read about the cold snap on our Australian east coast and see it on the news and that tends to make it just that - interesting news. But when I'm chatting to my friends on Twitter and Facebook and getting their brief twittergrams about how unusual that is, that is what drives it home.

These are people whose daily lives I've grown to know and appreciate. When six people from the same state say how unusual the weather is, I know it's more than just news - it's changing their lives, and by extension, mine.

When I combine that with my RSS reader articles, my reading on other people's blogs (see the sidebar of this blog for a cross-section of my blog roll, yes it's extensive but I like this kind of news feeding,) and the TV and newspaper news, I can see a LOT more than the specialist journalist or forecaster focusing on their particular area of expertise.

And it pays off in all sorts of ways. Latest news around the world? Delivered to my cell phone. All day. (And all night if I didn't set up my feeds to not bother me at night. But that's only a personal preference. Some people sleep with their megawiredness - I couldn't, not that the idea isn't attractive sometimes.) Latest sofware, gadgets, breaking news? Got it covered.

One of my payoffs was the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, which is my diet that was all I used to reverse impending prostate cancer. It's been over two years now and so far no signs of recurrence, and my actual diet has changed to a very healthy one ideed.

So there are all sorts of things that makes being hotwired for as much of the day as possible a benefit. But I also think the reason for the success of sites such as Twitter and Facebook is more than that, it's the fact that they are fitted with a tap, and you can drink your fill or ration it to a few drops a day.

Me, I'm going back to lolcats now, kthxbye!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well written and good points, all - and of course I was pointed here via twitterrific. :-Dh

Anonymous said...

Yes, you have captured it rather well! I look forward to my breaks a work and when a colleague asked me recently who was texting me so much, I just replied I was catching up on the news and told her about snow in Brunswick St which got the lunchroom talking.

Plus I am reading James Joyce's Ulysses in 140 character chunks and it is making sense! LOL!

( http://twitter.com/booktwo )

One thing though... I believe there is a distinction between 'twitter friends' and 'real life friends'. I have very few RLF who use twitter so most of my TFs are people I have never met and am never likely to meet. Some people have been added as friends of friends and it is amazing as to who pops up on whose friends list- there is a real chicken wire effect happening there! But I was hurt the other night when someone posted publicly that they weren't going to add me as they only added friends to their friends list. It may just be my vulnerabilities, but it made me feel like I was on the outside and didn't belong. Of course if people don't add me and don't tell me they are not adding me then I can cope. Strange 2.0 world we live in!


Fifikins

teddlesruss said...

Thx Melissa! I'd been thinking how to best put this, and that article started me off. With tools like Twitter and FB, I've noticed that I am gaining a much better insight into people all over the world, not just my local peeps.

And I have to say, FiC, that I found that many of the people I've added in Twitter are Perth people because Twitter seems such a good *local* tool as well as a worldwide messenger, and all I have to do to meet them is to go to a Port80 or blogger meetup and they will be RLF.

Also, back in the heyday of IRC etc we chatted to organise parties, and we got people (I'm not kidding here) from as far away as SOuth Africa and Texas plan their trips to include a week in Perth and a week in Adelaide (or whatever) to meet OLF IRL.

If you want to find Twitterers local to you, try http://twittermap.com/maps... I did and it was an eye-opener...

Books via SMS aren't my thing but I can see how it could be fun to organise something via Twitter bot, am thinking actually that I might have a game or two that could be run like that.

teddlesruss said...

Damn that was way too serious kthxbye!