I’m Afraid to Tears About Our Future and it Involves Twitter
I just returned from Jeff Pulver’s 140 Conference where I was a Character along with a few hundred others. It was a 
great conference but most of it was focused on validation of Twitter and not real-world skills that you can apply. That’s ok because between sessions I was able to meet some amazing people and re-introduce myself to those that I haven’t seen in a while. It was a large conference given the very narrow view (Twitter) and price point but the conference opened my eyes to a few things.
These things I’m going to list off are wonderful, exciting and yes they’ve given me a job and income for over 2 years.
What I’ve listed off are platforms. YouTube and Flickr are services but they have APIs that you can develop on. Each of these services has an API (aside from 3-G which is also a service) that you can develop for, extend and expand beyond the initial scope of the product. Everything I’ve written about in the past has finally come full circle and I’m afraid. You should read these posts or at least skim them before you read the rest of this piece:
Real life friends of mine know that I don’t like strictly web-based services. While talking to the product manager for Google Wave yesterday I flat out told him that I won’t use Google Wave as long as the domain name ends with “google.com” to access it. He said they’ve open-sourced it and I’ll be able to run it on a local server w/ Apache & MySQL. This would be the first Google service that did this so naturally I was surprised. We need to de-centralize everything right now or the human race is going to fall.
I’ve never been called a conspiracy theorists so before you start pointing at me, please let me finish.
This “OMFG We’re Doomed” moment came when I read Paul Carr’s post on TechCrunch prior to going to 140 Conference. Please read his post before you continue [LINK].
Shortly before the conference started, I saw this month’s cover of The New Yorker. (pictur
ed right) and I read a fascinating article about a new demographic known as iPhone moms. These are moms that have iPhones which subsequently means their kids have access to iPhones and they can play kid’s games and explore them. This is a market as defined by advertisers that is growing and ads are being targeted at children even though kids don’t own iPhones. Yep, kids are embracing touch, real-time and always on hyper-meta-local communications.
The photo from The New Yorker post didn’t scare me but it did give me an “oh shit” moment and as I looked at this post, I was at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood and had just checked in to pick up my conference badge. I looked out from my MacBook and saw every single person in the room walking to their destination staring into an iPhone screen and a young woman nearly collided with another like something out of a teenage sitcom from the 80s. Lucky they missed each other but it wasn’t due to awareness and was simply luck.
I nearly had a panic attack because I was in it and I was the only person looking around. During the conferences, there were 140 very quick sessions. 80 of them were validating twitter, another 40 more were pretty useful and 2 actually focused on taking it offline and making this real-time web real which always involved putting away your phone and giving your friend a hug!
Drew Olanoff (pictured below w/ the cap), my friend and creator of #BlameDrewsCancer spoke at the conference. His sessions involved asking the audience to open the phone application of the iPhone and call your family and tell them you love them. He dialed his fiance and told her he loved her and I went on stage to talk to my sister and put her on speakerphone as I told her that I loved her and missed her since I haven’t been home since January.
Drew gets it and we all missed it. Another session was a man who was homeless and now tweets and blogs telling the stories of other homeless people to give them a voice instead of just someone we see everyday as we walk to work that’s asking for change. As the courageous man stood on stage talking about how he used Twitter to affect people’s lives and not simply tweet about his food, a woman walked past me and whispered to her friend, “I don’t want to hear this shit.” and it was at that moment that I realized she was speaking for an entire generation of people who would rather broadcast their entire useless lives in an act of vanity instead of using the tools for real change that affects people.
Let’s talk about me for a second. I have over 53 thousand tweets and tweet over 100 times a day. My sharing is a different model and yes I’ll be reducing it soon. It takes me under 3 seconds to write a tweet on iPhone and about 2 seconds on my desktop. That’s really it. I type over 75 words per minute on the iPhone, a tweet comes to mind and I send it. Those sites that say every tweet takes 1 minute to compose are false. Those that have been doing this for a while have it to under 10 seconds. Broadcasting a photo takes 15 seconds and then I’m spending the other 5 minutes actually observing and looking. Adding it up, if every tweet took 15 seconds at max, I’d still only spend 30 minutes a day to send 120 tweets. In reality it’s about 5 seconds on average and less than 100 a day (most days) which would mean just 8 minutes a day tweeting. I’m enjoying, living and experiencing most of my day to day without tweeting it despite the fact that I share everything that you all would find interesting. Besides, I’m using Twitter these days not for self-serving broadcasting of what I’m eating but I spend hours a week taking notes and observing how my followers respond & interact with each and every tweet. You’re being monitored so be yourself and act naturally. When I’m done with my research, my twitter volume will go way down almost as if I never existed. You can read between the lines on that one.
Session after session at 140 Conference was filled with more about taking a dive into the river of information. During the panel with Robert Scoble (right), Dom Sagolla and Cathy Brooks, it was the most severe. Robert was begging for more filters so he could get more info that mattered to him in real time. Dom responded that Twitter is here to dip your toe in from time to time as needed but not a river that you should constantly be diving into. Robert continued on praising Twitter lists, search and his need for geo-tagged meta-data w/ real time content from every source so he could always be in touch.
Despite the fact that Robert is my friend, I felt like shouting from my “cheap seats” that he should just plug into the matrix tomorrow and be done with it! “Plug in Robert and live your entire life just receiving the data stream directly into your brain because that’s what you want!” During that panel and throughout those two days in Los Angeles, it was clear that there were so many people at the conference that were ready to plug in and live their entire lives as a console that sends & receives data. I’m not ready to live that way.
So many panelists would mention very odd things like, “but don’t tweet and drive kids” or a quote that really threw me off was, “I’m going to try to remember when my kid is being born next month that I need to stop tweeting and actually watch the birth.” And suddenly, I do a virtual *FacePalm* and feel like giving up.
I took the past few days off Twitter. At this writing, I’m still not tweeting. At some point, I was so busy sharing that I lost the concept of listening. I found it pretty funny how I help businesses use Twitter and social media. I know a few tips & tricks that people find valuable and I’m extremely cheap to hire and it’s something I enjoy. Something I say a lot is that we need to engage your customers and interact with them. Taking a step back from the situation I just used the words “engage” and “interact” and applied it to a service that consists of ones and zeros. That’s not how we should be living. I shouldn’t engage or interact with anything in a virtual world and if I do, it shouldn’t be called that because that’s not what it is!
Since returning to San Francisco, that is a very connected city, I realized that it was more “normal.” The 140 Conference was a gathering of Twitter fanatics who spend their lives and careers using Twitter, like me and it makes sense that the small group was so engulfed in their devices and not truly interacting in person. San Francisco being a very tech city isn’t a tenth as bad as it was during that conference so I imagine that back home in central Florida, people are still interacting and still engaging with each other in person and less over the web. We’ll see when I go home for Thanksgiving but I hope for our sake, that when I go out with old friends that everyone isn’t typing frantically into their phones sharing what kind of beer they ordered or that they have to pee.
One thing is for sure though. Just as silicon valley adopted the mouse and was first to start using Twitter, it will spread and the best products that come out of the bay area, eventually do go mainstream. 140 Conference was a glimpse into our future and it’s slowly taking over big cities like NYC, SF and LA and I’m pretty sure when I go home to Florida, there will be one person who is constantly glued to their phone when we all go out. It only takes one person to start a forest fire. As the fire spreads, our future will be bleak and full of humans who rarely interact or engage in real life and often share and receive virtually.
I even fear that one day our spoken language will disappear and simple brain impulses will be shared instantly as we think thoughts and opt to share them with our connected friends. Why such a crazy hypothesis? Video conferencing was the future and even an AT&T commercial from 1992 showed a mom video conferencing with her daughter from across the world and soon webcams were in computers, laptops and even cell phones. Video conferencing is dead. When is the last time you did a video chat with a friend and how does that compare to the amount of times you’ve tweeted or uploaded a photo from your cell phone?
Voice and video communications are not our future. It’s text now but soon it will be thoughts and what we see and 
hear will be dumped directly into our friend’s brains instantly as we become dumber and filled more with useless knowledge. How do I know that we’ll be okay with this? Because we’ve embraced the “boob tube” for 30 years now as content became less educational and more brainless and shows like Seinfeld soared in ratings as a “show about nothing” Seinfeld was a real-life story w/ no edge and it was totally believable. A story we can relate to is going to resonate better with us. A show about an explorer or documentary about history is boring because we can’t relate and don’t want to open our mind to something new. I can guarantee you if I told you to watch an hour of me sitting at a bar or about how food is metabolized and stores in your body, you’d go for the bar show because it’s easy and numbing. Lifecasters like Justin.tv and reality television has proven this over and over.
How quickly will we reach this state of being plugged in at all times? As quickly as technology can get us there. It’s not a question of will there be a market for this? There’s a market now for a small single digit percentage of the world if they’re able to optionally unplug whenever. It won’t take long before they receive the stream and send the stream 24/7 for the world to see.
I have a question. When the entire world is broadcasting, when will we have time to evolve and progress the human race? Never and this is what makes me cry.
My life is Twitter now and I make a lot of money helping people with Twitter. Twitter can exist as a tool without giving ourselves to it but inventors and scientists for hundreds of years have created tools and each time, the inventions stopped being tools and turned into weapons, entertainment devices and serve as another thing to own, use and become absorbed into. Think of any invention in the past 100 years that involves technology. It helps the human race get lazier. Everyone owns a treadmill that is never used but all of my friends have a desktop, laptop, iPhone, Wi-Fi everywhere, big screen TV, Xbox and some even have a kindle. It’s all entertainment and things aren’t going to get any better.
How has social networking and constant connection helped us as a race? It’s done more good than harm up until this point. Just as the television helped us watch the moonwalk live in the 60s and then quickly went downhill until every channel was reality TV. Twitter has connected people and helped raise awareness for those that are never given a chance to speak their voice. Twitter has helped news travel faster and helped me learn more about life in India, Bangladesh, Japan and even how often a baby kicks in real time. It’s helped me find a job, an apartment and even led me home when I got lost one night in SF. I found great rates on a Vegas hotel and learned that there was a blood drive a block from my house that I could go and give to. Twitter has been wonderful but it will slowly destroy us if we stop using it as a tool. The writings are on the wall as more people are plugging in and for the wrong reasons.
I hope the masses wake up before it’s too late; me included.
Here’s the 140 Characters Conference Video with Robert Scoble and Dom Sagolla
Photo Credits:
Damn… This is some scary stuff, and it's even scarier because many of us are completely blind to it all happening. Plus it's only going to happen faster because we keep asking for more integration, usability, features, etc…
All I can hope is that the world smartens up, or that it all happens once I'm gone.
Some really interesting big picture thoughts.
It's not even 3 years since I visited San Francisco, but sounds like so much has changed. Australia isn't quite as deep in it – but is heading the same way… I hope that we can learn something through these kinds of observations.
I think the trick is going to be learning how to use social media positively and get the balance right… Does being “connected” mean that you disconnect from other basic human aspects?
It's also interesting to think about what is going to happen with our physical environment… Are places like libraries, shopping centres & universities going to become redundant (or significantly different)?
Great post Adam. You always have great insight and an interesting take on things.
Adam,
Some extremely great thought here. Great post.
Like you, I have also taken the time to sit back and really watch what this is evolving into. I think that more and more we are getting glued to our devices, but I think that we need to use technology to embrace our lives, and I think that is what people are doing right now – to easily be connected over long distances. I just want to point out two points – feel free to tell me what you think.
Point 1: I am in marketing, and all of these social tools like Twitter and Facebook are really just tools that enhance what we are doing. It's helping us towards our goal of getting the information out to consumers and it's great because it directly hits their eyes, there is no filter like TV, radio and other broad casting solutions. I like where you say that the only thing on TV today is reality shows – I agree with you, but then again, you can always find the right TV to watch, it just takes a little bit of digging and I think that is really how the web is going to be – honestly, it already is – you have to search for the good content out there.
Point 2: I was recently watching ThisWeekinStartups with Jason Calacanis and Gary Vaynerchuk and they have both been to Japan before, and they were saying that being in Japan is like being in the future – everyone was constantly connected to their devices, there were no advertisement on buses or buildings, they were all online because that is where everyone is at (recently, I have been doing some heavy research in the Japanese markets, and some of the biggest technology companies are mobile advertising companies). Technology wakes you up, you ride the bus to work, you're on your mobile device, you go to work, you're on your computer, you ride the bus home, you're on your mobile device, you get home, again, you're interacting with technology.
So I do think that we will be connected with technology at all times, but I don't think we are quite at the period of being constantly connected to a console, just yet.
So, just a few thoughts I wanted to shoot out. Let me know what you think.