If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to send a tweet about it, did it really fall?<\/i><\/p>\n
This is the question I’ve been trying to wrap my head around today, after reading Steve Gillmor’s latest missive<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n 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 …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n One thing remained disconcerting, though: Gillmor actually called his wife before<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n Oh, Mr. Gillmor, I had looked up<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n _______<\/p>\n *The author suggests that readers not fully familiar with Twitter consult Dan Kennedy’s fairly comprehensive introduction<\/a> to the popular microblogging service.<\/p>\n\n