This is a follow on to my previous post.
I have been on Twitter for over three years, and it has opened up the world in a way that other social media or forums or any number of other online dynamics has never done for me. Just so you understand the magnitude of that statement from my perspective, I have had an internet id in one form or another since 1986 — several years before the Web was born and certainly before the general public even knew what the Internet was and maybe a couple of years before Al Gore invented it ;-). These were the days when the nice graphical user interface (GUI; pronounced gooey) that allows point and click existed. We could only hand key ping commands (which still run the Net under the covers today) into a command line, and the most sophisticated graphic was made with letters and symbols and viewed on a monochrome display. Eighty byte files we manually appended were used to create community, and those later became forums.
At that time, the only people on the Internet were the U.S. Military, a few other departments of the U.S. government, a few foreign groups, some universities doing R&D, and a handful of IT companies. We had a blast talking to each other about life and love and the future of technology, and I still have some of the bulletin board topics preserved in hard copy. They are precious to me because the interactions with those very thoughtful people literally and very dramatically changed my life. My views were expanded exponentially — in a way that reading thousands of books could probably never do. I was an avid reader at the time and still am, but the immense exchange of not only ideas but also of cultural perspectives had an energy to it that was like tapping into God. I believe in God, so my saying this is in no way making light of that. The Lord already knew all of this was going to happen with technology, and I love that He allows us to explore His creation.
There was also an awareness of God among that early online community. One of the topics often discussed was the pie in the sky of everyone talking to everyone else with immediate communications and how that could be construed as rebuilding the Tower of Babel and what all of that might really mean. Thankfully, I realized very quickly that I have no desire to be God or to play Him with the use of a tool like the Net but rather to enjoy what God has facilitated and let it benefit mankind. For those of you who don’t believe there is a God, obviously, you can disregard, but I would be remiss in not giving tribute where I feel it is deserved.
All of these experiences insured that I would forever have a passion for IT and the Net. So it is my pleasure to try to stay up on what is happening with respect to technical advances and especially with regard to communications. I don’t really have the view that I have to keep up with my kids. They usually have to keep up with me! LOL!
Fast forward 26 years, and Twitter is the realization of decades of dreaming and planning and building of a foundation for communications that is even better than I thought it would be. Does it have some problems? Are people involved? :D Yet it’s fantastic because relationships are integral to it. Isn’t that the point ultimately?
And for the recent moves by Twitter to do some censorship, I don’t sweat that because people have become inured to easy access to each other, and techies are the most rabid about preserving it. There’s no going back. So even if Twitter really starts clamping down, something else will spring up to take its place. But for now, this is the thing.
edit: oooh, lots of typos and bad sentences in this. That’s what I get for posting without editing. Ouch! LOL! I’ve fixed the typos I saw. You’ll have to live with the bad sentences. :D
RAFrenzy 