What are we becoming?

[migrated from myspace blog]

As a culture, I mean. I know this is certainly not a new topic, the de-personalization of bringing people closer through the Internet.

Yesterday I started an account at http://www.twitter.com. I added "friends" who I've never met, yet many of whose voices I've heard. If you aren't familiar with twitter, I'll explain. Twitter asks just one question: "What are you doing?" Users get 140 characters to answer using the web (twitter.com or Tweetbar, which lets you chronologically track all your friends, or even all twitter users, in a sidebar to Firefox), IMer, or phone text messaging. It's almost like real-time (if somewhat shallow) blogging with just a hint of IMing.

Then Cliff Ravenscraft listed http://twittervision.com in his twitter post today. This is literally a worldwide Google map combined with twitter. So messages are tied to a virtual pin in the map as they happen. As one person put it, we no longer need reality TV because a person could sit and watch people posting to twitter from all around the world...and it NEVER STOPS. I'm sitting here watching what people all over the world are doing RIGHT NOW and thinking, "But what am I doing?" I'm not working today, but there's got to be something better to do right now than this! I'm taking the dog for a walk...right now.