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How many tweets does an earthquake make?
March 31, 2009
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to send a tweet about it, did it really fall?
This is the question I've been trying to wrap my head around today, after reading Steve Gillmor's latest missive from the realtime future (where they speak a somewhat different version of English than we do at present). Gillmor reports on a seismic event that happened near his home earlier today:
This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter ...
Now at first, I have to confess, this struck me as kind of odd. Your spouse calls you to tell you about an earthquake at your house, a potentially catastrophic natural event, and the first thing you say is, "Was it on Twitter?" But then I realized I wasn't thinking of it from a fully realtime perspective. (I still find myself drifting back to real time now and then.) As soon as I recalibrated my mindset, everything came into focus: In realtime, nothing ever happens firsthand. Reality becomes real only after it has been mediated, encapsulated into an electronic message and shot through a network into a virtual community. The unstreamed life is no life at all.
One thing remained disconcerting, though: Gillmor actually called his wife before checking Twitter.* He appears to have given credence to a mere "jolt," an unmediated and purely sensory perception. In fact, he says, it took him a full "10 seconds" after his wife's question before he successfully checked Twitter, at which time he found "three screens of earthquake tweets." Finally, after unconscionable delay, the earthquake - a three-screener, no less! - had at last been granted entrance to the realm of the real. The tree had fallen.
Oh, Mr. Gillmor, I had looked up to you as my realtime guru, my Maharishi of the Perpetual Status-Update. Now it turns out that - dare I say it? - you have feet of flesh.
_______
*The author suggests that readers not fully familiar with Twitter consult Dan Kennedy's fairly comprehensive introduction to the popular microblogging service.
This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.
Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.
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