Twitter is significant because of its ability to measure its users’ impulses as individuals and groups. It’s a type of EEG for the evolving meta-mind comprised by the information with which we feed our technology.
We’re growing the meta-mind. We’re feeding it our thoughts, and it feeds us in return. Because of the internet, at no time in our species’ history have we had more choices to make in our diet of information than the ones we have right now.
Like physical nutrition, our mental nutrition serves us best when it is well-balanced. We need plenty of fibrous facts, soluble and insoluble. We need the bread and seeds of ideas. We need the fruit of the arts; we need the roots, tubers, and vines of communication. It’s even good for us to sensibly indulge in the rich fats and sweets of fantasy.
The internet offers an exponentially larger information buffet than 5,000 24-hour channels of television. As we feed ourselves on this information buffet, so too do we feed each other. You influence your friends as they influence you.
A statement made three connections away is now entering your senses. Now your mind reacts as you decide on a response to the statement. It’s a matter of seconds before your observation becomes the catalyst for another’s reaction.
But yeah, I’m just rambling. The point is that Twitter is like a brain pulse for the meta-mind. Everything you’re seeing now will be more common–more integrated, more interrelated. What will it mean for individuality once we all have direct access to the sum total of human knowledge? What will it mean when we get to the point at which our senses no longer need to physically experience information in order to perceive it?
But yeah, rambling again. I’m trying to say that the greatest processing engine we can create will consist of cooperative thought, and Twitter–at its best–is as close as we’ve gotten so far.
BTW, Google, if you’d like to prove me wrong, LET ME PLAY WITH WAVE AND I WILL DECIDE FOR MYSELF.