Twitterpated

Pressed for time as I always am these days, I read Twitter's Biz Stone On Starting A Revolution from NPR instead of listening to the interview with Biz Stone (is that his real name?).  Anyway, Biz is the creator of Twitter, which is a social media technology that I do not use and am not too familiar with because the general impression I get is that it's for people who like to continuously update their friends on every little thing they do each day (in 140 characters or less).  I also see it as part of why people's attention spans are decreasing rapidly.


My judgments aside, Twitter played an interesting role in the Egyptian revolution (is that what we're calling it?) that deserves to be recognized as an innovative use of this new(ish) technology.  In addition to using Twitter to organize, Egyptians used Twitter to broadcast what was happening in their country after the Internet was shut down.  Collaboration between Google and Twitter made it so people could call local numbers, speak into the phone, and this message would be made into tweets.  That's pretty neat.


In the article, Biz does talk about how these technologies are bringing the world together into a global community.  He believes that by reading a tweet from someone across the globe, we can feel greater empathy for our fellow humans.  I'm not sure about this.  On the one hand, it's another way to reach people and create ties across the world; on the other hand, it has the potential to weaken interpersonal relationships with your immediate world.