From Social Media Whore to Cyborg

My new Safari 4 Homepage -- too much information? It saves all my top sites and presents them in this view

So tonight I was watching the President’s speech to Congress and twittering at the same time, and I was asked if I was interested in a job opportunity based on my political commentary.   I was never much of a twitterer — I only have like 20 people following me, and although I’ve been a member for over a year, I never really used it much until very recently.  I couldn’t figure out what it was for.  How does someone use it?  What does it do?

I’ve been figuring it out slowly.  I’m not going to get too into it, but I think its greatest application is to be able to tell, through keyword searches, what themes and topics humanity (albeit a small percentage of humanity, and perhaps not representative of the whole) is thinking about at that moment (singularity jeebies anyone?).  One of the most twitted words during the President’s speech tonight was “quitter“.

A good secondary application is to stalk celebrities.  I’m now following the real shaq, thanks to someone’s facebook status update.  As of this evening I’m also following (twitterspeak for stalk) Steve Nash and Congressman Steve Israel (D-NY).

The scary thing is that this all really happened in the last few months.  All except for venerable facebook, which is kinda the friendster of modern social networking (that’s why I’m hardly ever on it anymore — check my wall).  First it was google reader.  Then slowly I started with the sharing of the links, the following sites like digg and reddit, then the blog, and now twittering.  Slowly I feel like I’m being inundated with so much information, but so far, my brain hasn’t exploded.  In fact I’m feeling quite intelligent — almost like I took a great leap forward in communication in the past few weeks.  Or in methods of communication.

But when does communication become information inundation?  I feel like I’m going faster and faster… well not that I’m going faster and faster, but that communication is getting quicker and quicker.  Yesterday I was ironing a shirt, and I almost decided to look up the proper way to do it on the internet.  Ten years ago that would have been ridiculous.  Ten years from now, I might be able to do that without dropping the iron.  Ten years after that, I might be able to learn how to do it instantaneously.  Some stranger posted a link on the singularity in my comments and I read it, now I feel like I”m living it.  And embracing it.

I’m a firm believer in the theory that exercising your brain and using for creative problem solving can only improve its elasticity and make it last longer, and at my advanced age thats a big plus.  Turning into a robot… we’ll worry about that later.

Filed under: Networking, Social Media, AI, artificial intelligence, blog, digg, facebook, google reader, MBA, new media, reddit, safari 4, singularity, Social Media, social media marketing, social networking, technology, twitter, unemployed, unemployed MBA