Twitter & Collective Conciousness
I first heard about Twitter at SXSW last year. “What the hell are these people talking about?” I wondered. Interesting to think back on, because it truly does take hearing about something several, maybe even 6-10, times, before you check it out. They did some study about that. For me, interesting as a musician to think about those stats and people discovering new music. But anyway, finally signed up for Twitter last week and the implications of the technology are mind-blowing. Actually keeping me awake at night. Definitely fodder for someone’s sociology thesis. Everyone elbowing to be the first to post an idea, observation, breaking story. Case in point, The Jindal-Kenneth comparison. I watched Jindal on “The Daily Show” last night and thought to myself, “Wow, he sounds like Kenneth from 30 Rock! Why didn’t they think of that?” And then did a Twitter search (www.search.twitter.com) and discovered that the whole Twitter-verse thought the same thing, and were all wanting to be the first person to proclaim it. Truth is, with Twitter, we are able to see the reality of collective consciousness, that it’s not always one person with an original idea, but we are all receiving the blessings and knowledge from the ether, whether we are conscious of it or not. In fact, someone’s probably writing about this very thing, just as I do. My favorite example of that is Lucinda Williams describing at a show how she wrote a song (damn I wish I could remember which one!) and was about to release it and found out Bob Dylan had just released one with the same (or very similar) title.
