What's a Twitter?

What’s most amusing and remarkable, I think, about this video is the fact that it goes back only eight years. In 2004, who would’ve ‘thunk of’ blogs? I stumbled on a Wall Street Journal article, around 2008, about following someone and something, but I had no idea what Twitter was, either.

Well, how about going back further in time, shall we, when the internet was still a novelty?

Some choice quotes from this video:

• Technology and the internet became “tools of the human spirit.”
• “It feels a bit like everyday human fellowship, but it’s bigger and more precise … It’s tap a yearning to connect.”
• “It’s a modulated anarchy. It’s an interesting kind of restraint that you find. There’s not a lot of cursing or swearing. There’s not a lot of personal cuts … There’s not screen fulls of ‘go to hell’.”
• “This overwhelming desire for people to be rooted.”

Hmm, the good old days, eh, before YouTube gave thousands of viewers a forum to vent their rude, demeaning and vulgar sentiments. The explosive rate of innovation in media and technology in the last decade alone seems to have released scores of us from restraint. Lawmakers and citizens alike sometimes bemoan a sense of lawlessness on the Wild Wild West of the internet. Hardly a form of restraint, is it.

Now fast forward to the present, and glimpse at the future.

We’re now well into the second decade of the 21st century. If the first decade brought us such revolutionary media as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and such revolutionary technology as iPod and iPhone … If the first decade also brought us such disruptive economic, political and military tragedies … then what can we expect next? If the curve on which media and technology progress gets faster and steeper, then might we fall off and get left behind at some point in the future? Or can we slow and flatten that curve a bit, so we can catch our breath and catch up with that rate of progress?

There are all kinds of predictions for this ‘teenage’ decade. Such as mobile technology being the next frontier for disruptive innovation, business models, and global reach. Such as China supplanting the US and becoming the number one economy in the world. Such as Google+ overtaking Facebook. In point of fact, we don’t know exactly. To me, predictions are an amusing academic, if not cocktail, activity. But with what I call The Black Swan algorithm, we ought to be mindful of, prepare for, and essentially expect the unexpected!

How was the preceding decade for you, and what do you anticipate in this decade? If time, money and knowledge were not an issue, what ‘next big thing’ would you want?

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD