Excuse me, is this tweet taken?

When I re-started this blog 3 years ago, I made the comment that blogging was one thing, but life was too short to use Twitter.  See my post about 'Blogging into the darkness.'

Actually, what I said was that if I wanted to bark randomly into the darkness, I would use Twitter, instead of a 'real' blog.

But, a few weeks ago, I made the leap and signed up on Twitter.  So, has it changed my life?  Not really.  I mean yes, it provides another news stream, which I do look at every other day or so.  (I think it's fair to say I'm not a news addict.)  And, what about my tweeting? How's that going, you might ask.  Well, it turns out that as daunting as writing my first post, I have been wondering how to launch my twiterary career.

What pops into my head are throw away lines like the following:

Excuse me, is this tweet taken?

I'd love to tweet, but I've got nothing to say.

Twitter is a messiah maker.  I have followers and I haven't written a word!

Don't follow me, I may not tweet.

Don't follow me, I'm lost too.

On the other hand, should I follow or match the style of this blog and try to write intelligently about news and developments in the world of connectivity?

Sounds good, but I don't want to produce a string (thread) of sound bite cliches.

As I was deliberating, I thought I should wait and post my first tweet from Silicon Valley.  It seems fitting some how.  And, so here I sit in the Marriott in San Jose.

To see that first tweet, check out @DarlKolb on Twitter (sorry, I haven't figured out how to link to a specific tweet... so much to learn!).

The Tyranny of the Instant

I never thought the Zen (New Age) mantra 'be here now' could have a down-side.  But, a preoccupation with the 'here and now' to the exclusion of historic perspective and sensible moderation can be dumb, if not downright dangerous.

Consider the hoax Tweet last week that President Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House, which sent the stock markets tumbling. See NY Times story, 'Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, Fears Rise.' Of course, in that case, the culprits were micro-trading high-frequency algorithms not human agents.  And, when humans checked the hoax out, the markets regained their losses.

One of the fundamental problems with Twitter is its one-dimensional concentration on the present tense to the exclusion of all other time and place perspectives.  Tom Chatfield discusses this in his book, How to Live in the Digital Age, where he observes: 'In an age of constant live connections, the central question of self-examination is drifting from 'Who are you?' towards 'What are you doing?'  Much as we hunger for connection, if we are to thrive, we need some sense of ourselves separate from this constant capacity to broadcast.  We need tenses other than the present--other qualities of time--in our lives.'

Chatfield recalls watching Jaron Lanier at South by Southwest in 2010, where he (Lanier) told his audience, 'The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn't to make me feel respected, but to make you exist.  If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say.  This is what makes you exist...'

So we are back to being here now, not broadcasting here now.