A tidbit that grabbed me from today’s Stowe Boyd post:
I am living in a world of streams. My desktop is a collection of streaming applications where others’ actions propagate themselves to my sight every few seconds.
I’ve been thinking about such “streams” for what seems like a long time, since 05 anyway when I really got my head around what RSS makes possible. Lots of other people were, too — long before FriendFeed appeared, folks like Jeremy Keith were writing about lifestreaming and cobbling together all the little time-stamped bits of identity they were producing on the web. I remember how suprglu had me bouncing off the walls with excitement.
The rubber really hit the road with the arrival of social-software environments that made it practical to follow the time-stamped streams of numerous people. Twitter. Then Facebook’s newsfeed, etc. That’s when it became clear that one could really plug in to this network presence; you could access the hive mind, a live “state of the vibe.”
I wonder if Twitter reminds anyone else of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age? (If you’ve got even a little sci-fi fanboy-ism in you and haven’t read this book, you’re missing out.) One of the book’s many threads revolves around a subculture (the Drummers) in which individuals — with aid of what amounts to nanotech communications gear bound into neurons and axons — are woven together into something … well, I’m not sure “more” describes it. Different, at least; capable of things a more atomized culture could not do. As one character says:
Get some Drummers together in a dark room, and they become a gestalt society.
We are not islands. And in the end my interest in social software is grounded in hope that it can be an agent of evolution, one that renders lone-ranger and us-versus-them worldviews increasingly obsolete.
Technorati Tags: twitter, social software, lifestreaming, evolution