Futurist Mark Pesce gave a great talk in Sidney on Twitter and the global power of social messaging. Please enjoy :
Quoting at length from the talk :
I call Twitter a “Social Messaging Service” – yes, another SMS – because it allows me to communicate much the same sorts things I would with a text message – but, rather than going to just one other person, I can send that message to over 530 of my followers. Many of these people are known to me – in person, or by reputation – but some follow me simply because they’re interested in what I have to say. Though most of the chatter on Twitter is inane – like the world’s weirdest cocktail party – some of it is incredibly immediate, vital and important.
As, for example, last Monday. Just before I left the house for the evening, I received a few tweets talking about the earthquake in China. What earthquake? I wondered – there’d been nothing about it on the telly, or on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, or the New York Times, or BBC News. Even the Associate Press hadn’t burped up an initial report. But I have one follower (whom I follow in return), Dedric Lam, who lives just outside Shanghai. Everyone in Shanghai felt the shaking, and, as they connected with one another, they all knew that everyone else in Shanghai had felt it, too. As they received tweets from places further away, they knew the shaking had been felt in Beijing – and quickly realized that Sichuan had gone dark. No tweets, no websites, no phone service. All of this flew by on Twitter a full thirty minutes before the first reports made their way onto the wire. When I met up with friends that night, I asked them if they had any news about the earthquake in China. They said, “What earthquake?”
Twitter, connecting people across boundaries of politics, culture and language through its social messaging service, has – quite accidentally – become a human early-warning system. One tweet might not have the ring of truth, unless it comes from a particularly well-trusted source. A thousand tweets, all saying more-or-less the same thing, possess enormous authenticity.
Thanks to Jason Calacanis (via, of course, Twitter) for the tip.
