Armageddon is here: Twitter is down and Fail Whale is not even there?!

I can't believe I am saying this, but I wish Fail Whale will come back soon!

We miss you, Fail Whale! We will never been mean to you and call you names again! Just come back!! You are so much better than a lot of other scenarios, we have now realized!

So... by now you have heard, or tweeted, oh, no, NOT tweeted, but left frantic comments on Mashable.com or Techcrunch.com or other websites where Social Media lovers hang out, after they have tweeted and Facebooked their hearts out, but still have something more to say.

Mashable is keeping a tab on the impending doom of humanity through this post:

Facebook Down. Twitter Down. Social Media Meltdown.

Thanks to our friend with the impossibly high cheekbones (I will need to write a blog about these cheekbones one day. I wonder whether it can cut through a piece of tissue? And what's up with the oh-so-appropriate and I-wish-my-dad-had-the-same last name, CASHMORE? Luck of the draw, I guess. But isn't illegal in the cosmic sense to be lucky in both the departments of Cheekbones and Family Names?), we have been kept abreast with the development of Armageddon in the making:

Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)

Now, my friend, is the time to panic!!!!!!! The sky is falling. The sky is falling!!

The sudden influx of Twitter refugees to Facebook site, wherelse are we going to post constant updates and complain about our frustrations that Twitter is DOWN, and also to strive to be the first ones to announce the DDoS attack on Twitter? has caused Facebook to go down as well.

The cyber terrorists could not have planned it better.

So now people, with their usual outlets having disappeared, have flocked to Mashable and Techcrunch to share their glib comments. On the one Techcrunch post, there are now more than 400 comments. And several Mashable posts dedicated to "Twitter Down!" have also received hundreds of comments. Most of them are like this:

"Yup. Still down."

(Thank you very much. Otherwise I would not have been able to find out on my own!!!!)

It has also become a fun sport to ponder who the Cyber attacker(s) may be:

Hugo Chavez? Iran? The Vatican?

My bet is on The Birthers, who are mad as hell because we all made fun of them mercilessly on Twitter. (Even Ann Coulter made fun of them, which made me feel kind of sorry for Birthers...)

But without Twitter as the forum, AND without the appropriate HASHTAGS #TwitterDown #DOS #WHOISBEHINDTHIS #TWITTERDDOS, the "Who Done It" game is just NOT the same...

By now some of us have gotten a rude awakening: Just how much YOU ARE obsessed with Twitter. Like the required cup of morning coffee.

CAN'T --- FUNCTION --- WITHOUT --- IT ---

Speaking of coffee, I think I am heading downstairs to Starbucks so I can talk to random strangers about this new social phenomenon called "Life Without Twitter"... And also get myself a cup of coffee while I am at it.

p.s. F*ck it! I knew it! As soon as I clicked on "Publish Post", Twitter came back. Great. Now I just seem more a dweeb than I actually already am by publishing this AFTER THE EFFECT. Stupid Twitter...

p.p.s. I take it back. I love you Twitter. Don't ever leave me like that again, ok?

p.p.p.s. Ooops. No. Twitter is STILL down. Yes! ... Oh. No. *sobs* Come back!

"Mommy, is tweeting bad?"

Nope. Didn't make this up. This came up in my conversation with my 6 year-old, Mr. Monk, in the car today.

Most of our conversations happen in the car now, it seems. Could Mr. Monk be that smart so as to figure out that when I am driving, I am cornered and hence have to provide some sort of answers to the hard questions he throws at me?

"Mommy, why do you tweet?"

Gee. He got the lingo right. Many adults are still struggling with when to use Twitter and when to use Tweet...

"Hmmm. Why SHOULDN'T I Tweet?"

That's a complete cop-out. I know.

"Is Tweeting bad?" See? He got that it's a VERB!

"No. Of course not. Why do you ask?"

"I am just wondering why you do it."

Hmm. Why did he assume it's bad just because I am doing it?!

"..... Ok. It's just like how you and your brother play on Runescape? it's just something fun that mommy likes to do. Mommy enjoys talking to people on Twitter."

Suave move, mom. Comparing Twitter to Runescape?! Let me turn the table on him...

"Now, why does it bother you so much that mommy is on Twitter?"

"I don't know. Because you get to do it all the time, without having to ask. We have to ask you or daddy when we want to play Runescape..."

I wonder if I HAD a regular hobby like sewing or knitting whether he would have been so bothered by it.

Wired article struck a cord and so I am copying and pasting the whole thing...

Ok. I am not really going to do this. But I just want to do something about this article: Scott Brown's "Gag Reflexes" in Wired (April 2009). The online edition has a longer title: "Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World" which sums up Mr. Brown's theory.

Maybe crumple up the page and eat it. But I already promised my husband that I will refrain from wrinkling up any magazine pages before he's done with them. (Ok. I am attempting to be funny here. If you read Mr. Brown article, you would understand why I feel exposed, caught in the act of trying to be funny. To earn more currency in this new economy...)

Is it wrong to want to quote an entire article really? Ok. Maybe not 100%. I don't really care for the examples Mr. Brown gave to support his argument. But the insights sprinkled in-between, those struck a cord.

I am no writer, and I am too tired (not to mention lazy), and here is my journal (i.e. I will do what I damn please), so I am going to jott down sentences that particularly resonate with me, and be done with it: (Thank goodness for Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V !!)

"... everything is 'material,' and life is one big writer's room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship"

"More than that: Everyone must be funny. Because 'funny' is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world."

Always feel this way since I got hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it feels almost like a comedy show writers' room, the pressure is on to be the next funniest. hence wisest, person in the Twitter stream that you can see.

"Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it's pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy."

I absolutely agree with #1. Feeling grateful that someone actually voiced this murky concept so clearly in one single sentence. Everyone is a guru of life, and the shallow shall be deep again. Not so sure about #2 since those are the fundamental tools of storytelling, upon which human history has been, and will be, passed on. What we don't see in the histories in the past is IRONY and self-awareness, imo, which, well, make intelligent comedies.

Moreover, it has always been my one belief that a great sense of humor indicates a great presence of intellect and tolerance.

And this final quote may sound like an accusation "Gotcha!"

"If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line."

Like I said, Google is Your Friend! Raise your hand if you have NEVER done this... Thankfully Mr. Brown provided hyperlinks to all the references he cited for the article.

Rising to the Challenge: trying to explain why I don't watch Lost

Dear Mr. Gleeson,

I know this sounds like a cop out to you, but here is a short, incompletely researched response to your question to which I have not responded to. But I have other duties to tend to, such as packing for our long trip to Asia which commences tomorrow, (Here is a picture as proof), finishing my work (unfortunately, I am one of those women that are "uppity" and need to prove themselves), and taking care of my children (hence the second part in my Twitter ID "Submom"). Anyway, enough with the violin in the background...

Though I am never an avid fan of any TV shows... On second thought, I do recall not being able to sleep when the BBC TV series, "Jane Eyre", was on many years ago. Kind of silly, I know, since everybody knows the plot already. But Timothy Dalton was quite dreamy as Mr. Rochester. By the way, what happened to the guy? Anyway, I digress...

Where was I? Oh, yes, I can understand your demand for a proof for my accusation that the writers of Lost have been known to change the plot when one of the mysteries was "figured out" and became public consensus through the many fan sites. I swear that I have come across an article talking about this, quite a few years ago, otherwise I would not have formulated such an impression since I do not watch the show. None at all. For those who simply came upon this blog post of mine without knowing the back story of why I am writing this post, please curb your anger. Yes, I know I should not be talking about a show I have not even seen. It's a long story. Suffice to say that on Twitter, I made such a bold confession: that I Hate Lost. The claim was made partly in jest as one of the random cyber vents I send out via Twitter: "You Know What I Hate?" If you are familiar with Mad TV, you know the bit I modeled this on. The audience is supposed to say, "WHAT?" with much glee and anticipation.

And it all went downhill from there.

I didn't mean to do this to garner attention, you know, the way how some people yell out obscenity for attention. Some other Twitterers responded and asked me Why? I then responded, because I was brought up with good manners. All in the name of trying to explain why me, personally, do not, and will not, spend my time watching Lost.

Yes, I get the irony of me spending time Twittering and writing this blog. But you have your guilty pleasure, and I have mine. Live and let live, they say.

Perhaps I was flattered that someone even cared about why I do not like Lost, won't even give it a try, No Sirree. I now feel compelled to give them a good reason. I am by no means a good writer. Please bear with me here.

So I cannot present you with the article tonight because Google failed me. When I typed in the keywords, "Lost Writers Changed Plot Fans Speculation", BOOM! the search engine came back with articles after articles, blogs after blogs, posts after posts, analyses, interviews, on Lost and its writers. It was like I opened Pandora's Box! And I promise you that I will continue trying. I am a researcher at heart, and I am as of now obsessed with finding it.

What's really interesting is that I came across quite a few articles that talked about how the Lost writers made up the plot(s) and mysteries as they went along, twist after twist (i.e. what I call "upper hand" over the audience which got your goat) especially in the previous seasons. So that pointed to the same direction as my said "grievance", to a certain degree. What I also found interesting is that even the writers themselves are finally realizing the entire alternative universe that they have created has taken on a life of its own. A new ecosystem separate from its creators. The collective force of the fans is larger than the writers themselves: through the Interweb, the fans have conjured up ,multiple universes more immense than what the writers have envisioned in the writers' room. I am especially fascinated by these two articles: one about continuity of the "mythology" and the other one about "time-space continuum".

(For Mr. Nation's dilemma for keeping all threads accounted for and untangled, I would like to suggest a relational database. Not a joke. In fact, the George Lucas empire does just that for the Star Wars ecosystem: with its own "Continuity department")

All brainy stuff. Great for debates and discussions, preferably after a pint or two.

In fact, if I were still in school, the analysis of the universe within Lost the Show and the meta-universe of Lost the Fandom as a way to understand how the Internet has changed how popular culture is shaped would be the subject of my dissertation.

Seeing how I have left school a long time ago, I will not spend my time on the show. Sorry. It requires too much investment on the part of the audience, perhaps that is where you and I differ fundamentally as TV watchers. I am the "brain-dead" type. I do not want to get sucked into a fictional world that is striving to be as complicated as the real world (albeit in very different ways) that I have to constantly worry about what is going to happen now and agonize over the fact that I cannot figure the mysteries out.

I worry too much as is. As for puzzles, I have my Sudoku and Crossword puzzles. Or my pre-teen boy.

And I stand by the point that it is hypocritical that men (yes, mostly men) laugh at women for treating soap opera characters as if they were real live people, while they discuss incessantly about what is going to happen to which group on the show Lost. I just have to laugh. Not passing judgement here. Just sayin' that if you think one scenario is ridiculous, then you have to take a good look at the other scenario.

Sincerely,

Not a Lost Fan

From The Economist: It's not 42. It's 148. The magic number for social networks.

Even on the Interweb, we cannot escape our evolutionary past. According to The Economist article: "Primates on Facebook", some of things that we do to/for each other on the social networks over the Internet can still be defined as "Grooming": you need to ping your peeps, follow up on their status, read their Tweets, comment on their Tweets, reply to their Wall because they have left something on yours. These all take time. So does monkeys' grooming each other.

A while back ago, Dr. Robin Dunbar concluded that our brains simply cannot support a social network with unlimited size: think of having to memorize all the names! Probably only Mr. Monk will be able to do that, but of course, he probably has the tiniest social network known to man... Irony, isn't it? Anyway, Dr. Dunbar suggested that the magic number of network limit any animal will be able to maintain is: 148.

Even though in the virtual world, it seems that we can grow our social networks indefinitely, to a certain extent obviously (say, like, 6 billion, the number of entire population...), the average number of "Friends" on Facebook turns out to be 120. And the number of Friends with which Facebookers interact with on a regular basis by leaving comments on their "Wall" is even smaller: 7. That's it. For men. Women are more social, 10.

Even for Facebookers that have more than 500 friends, the number remains relatively low at 17 for men, and 26 for women.

Here is a nice way of explaining this:

"[P]eople who are members of online social networks are not so much 'networking' as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle'... Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

This also concisely explains what a "social network" such as Twitter represents for a lot of its users, or Tweeple, as they call themselves. Only that it is even beyond the "outer tier of acquaintances", all the way into the nether.

Power of Twitter got to @RainnWilson whose followers surpassed 100,000 today...

Who says that size does not matter? When I first started following Rainn Wilson (of The Office Dwight the Beet Farmer & B&B Operator fame) on Twitter, he only had a meagerly 60,000+ followers. And that was like, last week. Here is a Tweet that he just sent out, in celebration of the 100K threshold which his Twitter account just crossed.

A job well done. Now he is in the big league, playing with the big players, the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Kutcher.

Mr. Wilson actually often has witty and wise things to part with his followers. Like a prophet to his disciples. Well, most of the popular Tweeple have taken on that quality. And I am looking forward to the day when Mr. Wilson's followers reach 200,000 plus. Then I think he will start growing horns with all that power going to his head...

Celebrities on Twitter: @Stephenfry has the most followers because he rocks!

I cannot believe that in my previous post of celebrities that tweet I forgot about Demi Moore. Sorry Mrs. Kutcher. And of course, her lovely, always good to look at, but probably illegal for me to fantasize about because of his young age, Mr. Kutcher.

Mr. Combs. How could I have forgotten Mr. Diddy? Yes, indeed, you are Diddy. THE Diddy.

And of course, Ooops I did it again. I forgot yet again our lovely Ms. Spears. She has 230,328 followers as of this moment. Amazing! But it does not seem that she does tweet herself. Sometimes. But not always. This cuts down on the fun exponentially.

My NEW fav? Stephen Fry. Mr. Fry has truly embraced the Web 2.0 social media phenom. If you cannot beat them, you join them. And do a much better, top-notch job. I wonder whether that's the Brit spirit at work. He is constantly taking and sending pics to Twitpic, so that we could live his celebrated life vicariously. Thanks much, man! You rock! You will never see this post, but a true fan will not mind. And keep up the good work.

As of now, Mr. Fry has 241,247 followers. Please please please. Keep your lead position. When Ms. Spears has more followers than you do, then we know the world is going to the loos.

p.s. Twitterholic tracks popularity of Tweeple. Check it out. It serves as a barometer of our times. Me thinks. Prez Obama, naturally has the lead. He is the World Lead so he has to win at every single competition...

There has been NO way for us common denizens to converse with celebrities. That is, until Twitter opened the door...

This is Twitter's stated mission (or designed usage) on its homepage:

"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Here is my observation: most of the people are using Twitter, not to keep their social network updated with what they are doing, how boring would that be? but to keep track of what celebrities are doing in real life.

Because they are famous, anything they say seems to carry so much more significance. A one-word Tweet becomes some sort of cypher waiting for you to discover its higher meaning. Their random observations of life are so much more hilarious simply because they are famous -- on the Internet, you cannot argue that it is funny because of the delivery. This is NOT Seinfeld. "Newman!"

(Speaking of Jerry Seinfeld. Did you hear that he is going to do a reality TV show about marriage? I bet he and his wife are happier than the lot of us because they have a 24-hour nanny...! So what would his advice be? Become really wealthy and then your marriage life would not be bogged down by arguments about who does more when and what...)

Rainn Wilson. MC Hammer. Luke Wilson. Elizabeth Banks. Jimmy Fallon. Neil Gaiman (he WAS already a celebrity in my household, now with the movie Coraline, he IS a celebrity...), LeVar Burton (of Star Trek fame, Yes, the cool blind dude!, and of Reading Rainbow, eh, fame), Shaq (yes, THE Shaq, under the moniker, The Real Shaq), and I am sure I probably miss quite a few. With some of them tweeting constantly. One cannot help but imagine Rainn Wilson tweeting on his BB in between takes of The Office. Does he show his Twitter stream to his co-stars? Do they suggest to him what he should tweet next? Do they laugh at clever responses back to @RainnWilson?

Yes, responses!

In the Twitterverse, you, apparently, are allowed to "Reply to" these celebrities' Tweets. And if you are lucky, if your star shines on you, THEY may actually Tweet back @ you. This stuff is what dreams are made of. And the real stuff that the wet dreams are made of? That is when the stars FOLLOW you back.

Then you will be a made man (or woman). You have arrived in the Twitterverse.

Here is my brush with fame today with a 10-foot pole:

Wil Wheaton, Gordi in Stand by Me, and also of Star Trek fame, although he probably prefers to be known as one of the Geek gods, a published writer, and a celebrated blogger (see: The Geek Gods), lives in the Twitterverse (again, see: The Geek Gods).

In one of his hundreds' of Tweets today, he gushes about The Onion:

"I love the Onion so much, I want to marry it!"

After I alerted The Onion about the raging endorsement, The Onion responded with a ringing rejection:

"America's Finest News Source Politely Turns Down Marriage Proposal From @wilw"

(My seminal role in this comedic exchange can be proven by the timeline shown in the search result, and of course, this picture).

God, I am a loser...

Sushi for you, Obama-san!

The chef did try very hard to make it non-offensive. A friendly gesture really. Look at the USA flag and the similes!

I am actually using this to test POSTEROUS

My first reaction was:

No! Not another Web 2.0 blogging/tweeting site...

How do they expect us to keep up? Very soon, only SAHMs, celebrities, VC guys, and hackers will have enough time on their hands to keep up with all these things.

Yeah yeah yeah. Spam me for blasting SAHMs. I was one for 2 years so I know. Despite all your complaining, you DO have downtime to go online... So there. Be quiet and get back to your chatrooms. (Or, I am just jealous, ok? because I have to work!)

Posterous should thank RainnWilson on Twitter. His tweet I am guessing would bring an onslaught of people to check out the site at least. Moi included.

So do I replace my blog with my own page on Posterous.com?

I am not crying as hard since I do not have attachment to Twitpic or Flikr. BUT, do they support mobile apps?

Posted via email from submom's posterous

#Piqqem now has 270 followers...

It is amazing to see how a Tweep (or, what's the name for a company/entity that tweets? And Christi on Southwest... is she a Tweep or is the Tweet Southwest's?) grows the number of followers. I wonder whether there is a 3rd party Twitter apps. out there that tracks number of followers for selected Twitter accounts at the end of each day. Then we can do some trendline analysis, plug in significant events into the timeline, and do some regression.

The power of word of mouth. The tipping point.

#followfriday and/or #fridayfollow

When does it become so big that it stops being effective?

Once again, I wish I were back in Grad School: so many fascinating topics to choose from for virtual Performance Studies. What would Ervin Goffman have said about all this in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life? Maybe nothing. Can Sociology be applied to virtual societies where you don't see people, rather, you see the texts representing them?

Note to self: Buy lottery tickets. Win. Go back to school.

p.s. Piqqem acquired 3 more followers in the time of my writing this post. Yes, probably not as fast as how some celebrities acquire followers, but still... I am intrigued.

But, wait, there is more!

Note to self: Google is your friend!! When in doubt, Google. Even my 6-yo would say, "Let's google!" when I cannot answer one of his rapid-fired questions. But as always, beware of what you read if the source is wikipedia. Anyhow, did some googling, and answered my own question wrt. 3rd-party tracking apps. No need to go outside of the house: the Twitter team has thought of that from the beginning. DUH. Check out #hashtags to see what's being tweeted about right now. And for sure, soon it will be written up in the WSJ. When that happens, you know you need to find the next hottest thing.

Crowd sourcing to beat the market: the new tag "$" on Twitter

Thanks to Wired, I know now what "$" and "#" mean in Twitter-nese. Yes, I am a N00b...

The enigmatic title "On Twitter, $ Is the New #" serves as a test: If you have to ask, I guess this is not meant for you...

I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know about the search.twitter URL until I read the Wired blog. How handy. Now I know why so many Tweets had a "#" within them. Duh.

Vanity search-ers now have a new venue and new obsession also, I guess.

I like how Twitter is explained as a distributed social network rooter in SMS, yet larger than SMS:

"Though Twitter has roots in the world of text messaging, it's a distributed network. Your tweets are broadcast, and what may feel like a one-to-one communication is actually one-to-many. This enormity of scale has made it easy for individual tweets to blossom into wide-reaching conversations, but it's also made those conversations much more difficult to follow."

So if you want to talk about a particular publicly traded company on Twitter, just add "$" in front of the company's ticker, e.g. $GOOG. And a company is already utilizing this, or at least attempting to. The idea that Piqqem has is intriguing to say the least:

They have "urged Twitter users to adopt the dollar sign tag in order to help it keep track of how people on the web are feeling about a particular company's stock. The plan is to use that data to beat the market and give more informed trading advice." Sourcing the wisdom of the crowd.

It is going to be a very interesting experiment: stuff that researches and dissertations are made of, IF they survive long enough to get enough attention.

In addition, I am curious to see how many Twitter followers Piqqem has. As the writing of the Wired blog, there were 185. Now there are 190. No, 191, since I just followed them also.

Moment: JetBlue & Southwest tweeting each other...

Saw this on my Twitter homepage. It strikes me as really adorable. I do hope that the actual airlines remain competitors since a collaboration between the two little giants (and they are really not little any more despite the images they are trying to cultivate...) will be the end of low airfares.

Metablogging: Maybe we are all egomaniacs...

and if we were, or, if I were, I would not be sitting here at 6 am worried about my being an egomaniac and what all this blogging and twittering and facebooking says about me as an individual.

Is it not enough to live an anonymous life? Or, Why is it not enough to live an anonymous life?

I asked myself guiltily.

What does this say about me? Does this mean I am so ill content in my own personal, real, life that I need to create a separate persona for myself in the cyber space? What kind of wuss am I that I cannot do something about my "real" life?

Doesn't "We Are All Egomaniacs" have a nice ring to it? Nice name for an alt. rock band?

Here is what the venerable (or at least expensive) Forrester Research has to say about Microblogs, i.e. Twitter and its like:

"The current darlings of media attention, microblogs appeal to both the egocentrism and the voyeurism of Web 2.0 aficionados."

From Oliver Young's research article on Enterprise Web 2.0 (published in November 2008)

Mr. Young is a fine researcher with a good head on his shoulder, let me preface by saying this. The irony of his comment on microblogging is that, and I suspect that he himself has sensed the irony, he is on Twitter (with 337 followers and not all of them are friends or FOAF).

To Tweet or Not to Tweet...

Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that's your reasoning for using Twitter ("one to many" instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of "friends" (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids' pictures down anybody's throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE's publication), in the current issue: "To Twitter or Not to Twitter" by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot...)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb "Tweet"... But it's the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to...)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker's Tweeting about "waking up in the morning now". Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, "Why would anybody want to know?" And if they want to know, can't you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, "I TXT, therefore I am." The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. "I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am." A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky's article:

"Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I'm a confirmed e-mail user, but that's so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.


It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today's youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They're always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.


So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn't this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I'm missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness."

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 5 July 1993

"I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking." (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005