Twitter

I joined twitter recently.

...After resisting all invites, and avoiding reading most references about it for quite a long time.

I simply didn't feel like I had the time or interest to devote to something so shallow and trivial. It looked at first and second and third glance like the worst of the social networking, time-wasting brain deadening, narcissistic scourges of the internet.

Then, low and behold, I started getting the occasional invite from people I actually respect! That put a different complexion on the matter, but I was still extremely dubious.

After a couple of weeks, I'm really enjoying it! Sort of scary when you think of it...

It's quite different than I first imagined, and that difference is about the atmosphere more than anything. Here's a couple of decent (short, naturally... Cool

) articles that amplify what I'm talking about:

Twitter Is A Tool For Ambient Awareness
by Heather Negley - follow her @infoknot
source

Twitter was founded in 2006 and in three short years, it has lodged itself squarely in the middle of our collective consciousness. If the medium is the message, Twitter is loud and clear even if the message is only 140 characters or less. But still I am asked the question all the time “Why? Do we need to know what others are doing all the time?” The answer is “no”. We don’t and there is no way to keep up with what everyone is doing all the time. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you try and wind up in throes of an information overload attack that will make you more jittery than drinking a pot of coffee. Twitter has filled a void though. Like other communications mediums that have come before it, the telegraph, the radio, or the phone, each one does not replace the other. We manage them and they find a place in our lives when they are needed.

Twitter is a tool for a form of communication we all do whether we realize it or not. It’s called ambient awareness. Let me give you an example, when I lived in Denver, I lived in the suburb of Westminster and took the bus to work everyday downtown to the denverpost.com. I saw the same people on my route everyday. There was the guy who took his dog with him to work. The dog always wore a green “work” jacket. In over a year’s time, I never spoke to him, but learned that he trained seeing eye dogs and that dog he had been bringing with him “wasn’t really his cup of tea” as he told a fellow bus passenger one day. At Starbucks, I would sit and drink coffee and see the same visually impaired guy walk by day after day. I watched him cross the street at the same spot and marveled at how he could cross a busy road by himself. Overtime, I learned that he lived around the corner and that his girlfriend sometimes walked with him. On the trolley, up sixteenth street to my final destination, I would sometimes run into an old friend from high school who worked in the building next to mine. He was someone whom I had lost touch with and chatted with when I ran into him. All these experiences are a form of peripheral communication. Repeated observations, overhearing conversations or even running into someone you know serendipitously. Over time, I learned interesting things about each person. I’m sure there were many people that I missed during this time too. And that’s okay. For some reason or another, they didn’t catch my attention.

So if you are using Twitter, on a regular basis, you might find this happening to you too. Little snippets of someone’s life over and over again become woven into a story that becomes meaningful to you. Watch the conversations, follow the people that you find interesting, look for people you know and let it lead you to new places that you never even knew you wanted to go.

I'm actually finding that to be quite true. I'm finding old friends that I haven't seen or talked to in ages, newer friends from far and wide, including some locals, some integralites, some noetics, and some minor celebs that when mixed and shaken, create a compelling ambiance.

My good friend Stephen Dinan is even more captivated by the medium than I am. He's been writing a bit on the subject, as well as doing a lot of twittering:

The Spiritual Importance of Twitter
source

When something is wildly successful, as Twitter now is, I often ask myself about its higher purpose. In other words, what might be the deeper meaning of Twitter?

Although I was a Twitter naysayer at first, I’m now convinced that Twitter is part of the spiritual evolution of our species. Its growth corresponds to the accelerating spread of a global consciousness, one in which our sense of boundaries no longer end at national boundaries and we are increasingly in touch with our sense of “oneness” with others.

Twitter’s unique format contributes to our growth in a variety of ways:

1. Speed of learning: Never before have new ideas been able to propagate as rapidly. The emergence of the Twitterverse allows a new thought or idea to almost instantly be propagated through networks of like-minded people around the world, which can increasingly accelerate the learning process for our species as a whole. We become more like synapses in a global net of learning, almost instantly aware of the most important new breakthroughs.

2. Ambient intimacy: For the first time, a communication medium allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of the thoughts and feelings of thousands of people in a way that is intimate without being intrusive. The term “ambient intimacy” was coined by Leisa Reichelt, and it’s central to the success of social media platforms such as Facebook, Flickr and Digg. However, the opportunity for ambient intimacy is most advanced on Twitter because it has the shortest communication structure (140 characters) and a format that allows one to scan a large number of such feeds rapidly. The implication for our spiritual growth is profound. The more rigid and protected our personal boundaries, the more we tend to suspect others and create conflicts. As we increase our sense of personal intimacy with other places, races, and cultures, we becomes less suspicious and protective. We expand our sense of global family.

3. Increased authenticity: In order to contribute to the flow of value on Twitter and build followers, we need to keep asking ourselves what is most real in our lives at this moment? In this sense, Twitter is part of a movement towards radically increased authenticity, as the boundaries between our public and private selves dissolve. This began to happen in a pronounced way with blogging but Twitter takes it to the next level since the short format allows much more rapid, unfiltered, and uncensored moments. From a spiritual perspective, this can bee seen as bringing our personal selves into full alignment with our soul, which has no secrets. Transparency makes us more truthful, which in turn brings us into greater alignment with our higher selves. Authenticity has long been at the foundation of all good therapy and Twitter offers a form of free psychotherapy by encouraging us to regular share our inner world with others.

4. Customized attention networks: With Twitter, we are able to fine-tune exactly who we find most interesting to follow – and change that in a moment. As our own consciousness is evolving, different perspectives will prove more or less catalytic to our growth. Being able to rapidly fine-tune our inputs at every moment allows us to stay on our growth edge. Each person that we follow becomes a link to our consciousness, with their deepest ideas, inspired recommendations, and heartfelt reflections transmitting to ours. The mass media offer a much grosser approximation with “verticals” in which each of us was assumed to mainly inhabit one market or demographic. In the Twitterverse, we are tailoring our media to exactly mirror our current preferences.

5. Increased individuality – At the same time that we are creating a more blurred sense of information boundaries, Twitter also encourages us to expand our individuality. If we simply repeat what others say, we will not be particularly interesting to follow on Twitter. There is thus a strong push to individuate ourselves and get very clear about our unique offerings to the larger world. This helps to undo the tendency of most of our media to push us towards similar tastes and interests. We each, in effect, become our own miniature media network and need to discover what our unique niche is.

6. Tracking global concerns – the new search function for Twitter allows us to track the most pressing concerns for the Twitterverse as a whole instead of having those concerns interpreted through a media filter. This allows us to have a more direct feeling for the true state of our collective “mind” and thus more sensitively understand what matters most to the human family at any particular moment. This awareness is also part of propelling us beyond purely local, tribal, or cultural awareness.

7. Personal connection to our heroes and heroines - Twitter gives us a portal into the innermost thoughts of our greatest heroes and most respected heroines. It’s thus a way to take them off a pedestal and help us realize that we have the potential to live a life as bold, influential, or magical as they do. The pipeline to our heroes is also more direct and unfiltered, which helps them inspire us more regularly, without exaggerating our tendency to put people out of arm’s reach.

As Twitter continues to evolve, there will likely be many new implications for our spiritual growth. So these seven areas are really only a start of looking at the spiritual meaning of what is arising. As our learning and exchange networks become ever-more instantaneous, we participate in something like a global brain, with each of us as synapses between different learning nodes, all connected to thousands of other nodes. It is very early in the evolution of Twitter but the spiritual meaning of the service may be truly profound.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter! http://www.twitter.com/stephendinan

And here is my SHIFT List of Evolutionary Leaders You'll Want to Follow on Twitter http://bit.ly/m9XKj

If you enjoy this article and my SHIFT List, I encourage you to also join TheShiftMovement twibe.

So there it is. A rather broad range of perspectives ranging from the utterly narcissistic to the spiritually profound. Take your choice...

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