I have this picture in my mind of McCain and Kissinger sitting in comfortable armchairs in a well-appointed governmental office, a couple of aides hovering in the corners, and McCain is bent over his iPhone tapping out a tweet, a vague grin spread across his face. Kissinger isn't smiling.

I don't know whether Kissinger tweets. But I did discover two fake Henry Kissingers on Twitter: this one and this one. The former is tedious, but the latter's pretty good: "Just had breakfast with former President Clinton. We both wore the same tie. It was very funny."

In the wake of the Iranian election, says Rachman, Twitter's "terseness and immediacy came into its own." But he suspects that its role as a revolutionary tool is overrated: "The French revolutionaries somehow managed in 1789, without being able to tweet to each other: 'Big demo planned outside Bastille.' The Iranians of 2009 look likely to fail, in spite of the invention of Twitter in the intervening 220 years."

Then again, if Twitter is turning the mighty into peasants, we may not even need revolutions any more. Obama should send Ahmadinejad an iPhone with the Tweetie app preinstalled. "Meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the smartest man in the world." No tyrant could survive a tweet like that.

1. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

2. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

3. Prisoner of the State, by Zhao Ziyang

4. The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr

5. The Bear, by William Faulkner

6. Winchell, by Neal Gabler

7. Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

8. Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid

9. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

10. God: A Biography, by Jack Miles

As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb of Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, spends his unscheduled time wandering the fabricated landscapes of World of Warcraft, seeking adventure.

In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness."

The researchers also looked at gender differences among Wikipedians. They found that the women who contribute to the online encyclopedia exhibit unusually high levels of introversion. Women in particular, they suggest, "seem to use the Internet as a compensative tool" that allows them to "express themselves" in a way "they find difficult in the offline world."

The study is consistent with other research into the motivations underlying online social production. Last year, researchers at HP Labs undertook an extensive study of why people upload videos to YouTube. They found that contributors are primarily driven by a craving for attention. If the videos they upload aren't clicked on, they tend to quickly exit the "community." YouTubers view their contributions not as pieces of "a digital commons" but as "private goods" that are "paid for by attention."

Scott Caplan, a communications professor at the University of Delaware, tells New Scientist that studies of social networks generally indicate that "people who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of social anxiety and lower social skills."

None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings do lend a darker tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds online communities. A wag might suggest that "social production" would be more accurately termed "antisocial production."

I woke up this morning to discover that I no longer exist. The entire contents of this blog has been erased from Google's index. Every post. Every last bon mot. Gone. Without a trace.

Here, by way of illustration, is what you'll get if you google the word "google" and restrict the search to the roughtype.com domain:

Now I know how Adam and Eve felt after God kicked their sorry asses out of Eden.

I'm on my knees. Please, Google, I beg of you, let me back into the promised land. I swear I'll never use Bing again.

UPDATE: I'm unbanished. See comments for details.

I couldn't help but be reminded of how, back in 2001, Google saved the life of that fellow who was about to suffer a heart attack. The guy was having chest pains, and he went to the Web to seek medical advice. The first search engine he tried - not Google's - got bogged down by serving up graphical banner ads. So he switched to Google, which only served text ads, and in a snap discovered he should take aspirin and go to a hospital. "Not only did our search engine save his life," said Sergey Brin, the other, equally humble cofounder, "but it shows that these decisions - like whether to use text-based or graphical ads - matter."

In 2005, Google announced that it would begin running graphical ads to increase its revenues. By that time, most people had broadband connections and, for them, loading graphical ads was no longer quite so much of a life-threatening ordeal. And what of the millions of people who continued to rely on pokey dial-up connections? Google ran the numbers, I suppose, and calculated that they were dispensable.

Yesterday, it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a jittery twittery service that the paper describes as "a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts." The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out. Times Wire doesn't just give the Gray Lady a facelift; it jabs an IV into the ashen flesh of her forearm and hooks her up to a Red Bull drip bag. It's Times Wired.

This isn't the first appearance of Times Wire. The original was installed next to the death bed of former president Woodrow Wilson on February 1, 1924, as the Times reported in a story headlined "Times Wire Near Bedside":

Special facilities to transmit the news from former President Wilson's bedside were installed by The New York Times early this evening. A telephone wire was connected with The Times Washington Bureau in the Albee Building and temporary headquarters half a block from the Wilson home in S Street. A Morse instrument was attached to this wire and every change in Mr. Wilson's condition was instantly flashed to the Washington Bureau and then transmitted over leased wires to the New York office of The Times, giving the most expeditious service.

That's right: Woodrow Wilson, though he surely didn't realize it at the time, was the world's first Twitterer.

woodrow: Still dying.

Now every story gets the ailing president treatment. Not only is all the news fit to stream, but realtime renders all news equal.

But there's real realtime and there's faux realtime, and it remains to be seen whether the Times will prove streamworthy. Techcrunch worries that the paper's "real-time river isn’t flowing fast enough." After all, "by the time an old media site gets a story approved, written and edited, a dozen blogs probably have already covered the same news." Times Wire offers "some interesting reads," but "none are particularly new."

Realtime is a harsh mistress. She wants everything, from androgynous 80s pop stars to terminally ill world leaders, and she wants it now.

This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.

This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.

Nelson also points to a memorable video clip that I somehow missed, in which Stephen Colbert clears up the confusion about the proper perfect-tense form of the verb "to twitter":

This may well be my most multimediatastic post ever.

Twitter's recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching an estimated 14 million. This month, with Ashton's Million Follower March and Oprah's First Tweet, the Twitter flock has almost certainly swelled even more quickly. Everybody who's anybody is giving Twitter a whirl.

But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, at least three out of every five people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks:

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.

Even Oprah, it seems, may already be losing interest. Of the 20 tweets she's issued since joining Twitter 11 days ago, half came on her first day. She's made nary a tweet in the last four days.

The half-life of a microblog, it turns out, is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high - and they've now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter's high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service's growth, says Nielsen's David Martin: "A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure ... There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty."

The FT's David Gelles says that Twitter's weak retention numbers "give good reason to think that Facebook, with its 200m users and robust retention rates, has little to fear from the flurry of interest in Twitter." That remains to be seen. Even a modest boost in Twitter's retention rate would improve its long-term prospects significantly. But if Nielsen's numbers are accurate, and if they don't improve, Twitter may turn out to be the CB radio of Web 2.0.

Before this century shall run out, Journalism will be the whole press - the whole human thought. Through that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech - multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet - mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood, at the extremities of earth, it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plenitude. It will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book - the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a Newspaper.

Today, I went out and picked my copy of the Sunday New York Times off the dirt, shucked off its damp plastic wrapper, and felt like a mug. I had already seen all the headlines on the web; the cover story of the magazine had been up on the Times's site forever. I pay good money for my subscription - I keep the goddamn newsroom afloat - and the Times treats me with contempt. It laughs in my face.

But what choice does it have?

The Newspaper arrives too late. The only Newspaper possible from today is a Text. A Tweet. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth.

Unripeness is all.

A hundred years ago, James Gordon Bennett Jr., editor of the New York Herald, was criticized for the inconsistency of his paper. He replied: "I bring the paper out every day. Advertisement dwells in a one-day world."

Media define our conception of time. The one-day world is gone. Today it's a one-minute world. Today it's a one-second world. Today it's realtime.

Writing of the arrival of radio, Harold Innis, the economic historian who taught McLuhan everything he knew, observed, in his 1951 book The Bias of Communication:

The radio accentuated the importance of the ephemeral and of the superficial ... The demands of the new media were imposed on the older media, the newspaper and the book. With these powerful developments time was destroyed and it became increasingly difficult to achieve continuity or to ask for a consideration of the future.

We think we're special with our high technology. But we're merely living out a fate ordained centuries ago when the distribution of the word was originally mechanized. Time is in pieces. We shake them as a baby shakes its rattle.

This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.

Now, Bray is looking forward to the fast-approaching day when he'll also be able to get rid of his many books, leaving his walls even emptier. Their contents, too, will be digitized, turned into files that can be displayed on a handy e-book reader like Amazon's Kindle. He writes: "I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular." Physical books, he says, "are toast," and that's "a good thing."

He has a sense that removing the "clutter" of his books, along with his other media artifacts, will turn his home into a secular version of a "monastic cell": "I dream of a mostly-empty room, brilliantly lit, the outside visible from inside. The chief furnishings would be a few well-loved faces and voices because it’s about people not things." He is quick to add, though, that it will be a monastic cell outfitted with the latest data-processing technologies. Networked computers will "bring the universe of words and sounds and pictures to hand on demand. But not get dusty or pile up in corners."

It's a nice dream, and a common one: the shucking off of material possessions to achieve a purer, spiritually richer life. But there's a deep, perhaps even tragic, flaw in Bray's thinking, at least when it comes to those books. He's assuming that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn't. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.

The author Steven Johnson, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, praises many of the new features of digital e-book readers, but he's under no illusion that books will make the transition from page to screen unchanged. We're going to lose something along the way. That became clear to him the moment he began using his new Kindle:

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways ... Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article - sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. [As reading shifts to networked devices,] I fear that one of the great joys of book reading - the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas - will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

Whatever its charms, the online world is a world of clutter. It's designed to be a world of clutter - of distractions and interruptions, of attention doled out by the thimbleful, of little loosely connected bits whirling in and out of consciousness. The irony in Bray's vision of a bookless monastic cell is that it was the printed book itself that brought the ethic of the monastery - the ethic of deep attentiveness, of contemplativeness, of singlemindedness - to the general public. When the printed book began arriving in people's homes in the late fifteenth century, it brought with it, as Elizabeth Eisenstein describes in her magisterial history The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, "the same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion."

When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.

A flashmob is, in case it's already slipped your mind, "a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." The term is, as Wikipedia continues, "generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media or viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt." Flashmobs had their moment of near-fame back in the middle years of this decade. I believe they were particularly popular in Finland.

Flashmobs were okay, but they had a couple of big downsides. First, they required you to go outside. Second, you had to, well, be in a flashmob. Both downsides are nicely illustrated in this video:

Hashmobs solve both problems by transferring the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the "hashtags" that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of a hash sign, ie, #, in front of a word or word-portmanteau, eg, #obama or #obamadog. The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don't have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don't actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob.

The canonical example (to date) of a hashmob emerged a few days ago around the hashtag #amazonfail. Amazon.com, as the result of a foul-up relating to its classification system for products, temporarily removed gay-and-lesbian-themed books from its sales rankings. Soon after the snafu, or, if you wish, FAIL!, came to light, a trickle of tweets labeled #amazonfail started to drip from the realtime faucet. The trickle promptly turned into a raging torrent - thousands of angry tweets an hour. The resulting hashmob spent a day or two pillorying Amazon and spinning various imaginary conspiracy theories, some of the more ridiculous of which fingered Amazon as a member of an anti-gay cabal run by Mormon elders. Because journalists have become some of the most avid Twitterers, the #amazonfail hashmob quickly gained a good bit of press coverage.

And then, as it became clear that the reaction had far exceeded its cause, the hashmob slowly dispersed. Tag it #amazonfailfail.

If you're not sufficiently adapted to realtime, you may wake up after an enjoyable day of hashmobbery feeling a touch of remorse. One #amazonfail hashmobber, Clay Shirky, aired his rue yesterday. Admitting that "the emotional pleasure of using the #amazonfail hashtag was intoxicating," he wrote:

Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place ...

Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began ... We know all that, but we’re no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don’t trust them, and we don’t trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do the bad thing we’ve come to hate them for.

In his own post-mortem, Bill Thompson, the BBC tech blogger, was not so forgiving:

As I write this [Amazon] has claimed that the episode was an unfortunate [mistake] and does not reflect a new policy, and I'm tempted to believe that it was never their intention to delist or downgrade books that are about gay, lesbian, transsexual or bisexual issues - or those written by authors who are not aggressively heterosexual in their appetites ... However they have clearly broken the bond of trust with a large number of their readers, and it will take a long time to recover.

Fortunately for Amazon, a "long time" in realtime is equal to about five minutes in clock time. Being beaten with the virtual pillows of a hashmob may not have been pleasant, but it's not going to cause the company any permanent, or even passing, harm. It was a tempest in a tweetpot, a ripple in the stream.

This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.