Whit AndrewsI was in Mumbai last February. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia; I had never seen anything like it.
My mother called tonight — we talk most nights — and she asked if I had followed what is happening. I allowed that I hadn’t. I did, after I finished some simple tasks part of my job, look at the Web news. And then I found my way to Twitter.
No doubt many readers have found their ways there sooner than I for much less important things. What struck me immediately was the call — or at least, the statement that there was a call — for tweets about what was happening to stop, because terrorists are monitoring it. Bombay’s government was said — and I have no authority to confirm this — to call for a shutdown of the #mumbai data stream.
I was a bonehead in college, and I lamented the shift of card catalogs to computer systems. I thought that would make it easy to delete everything in one place. (The Global Hard Drive, right?) Same now — seems like, when we see this sort of apparently centralized, concentrated info stream, we should just hide it so the bad people can’t see it.
The truth is, there’s no centralization. There’s twitter, but the wikipedia entry is being edited in real time, too, and there is flickr (although I’m not seeing pictures) and a zillion other places where this information is in real time, and then some. Massive distribution does not respond to deletion or shutting down.
“I thought twitter was a passing fad. It’s the future.” I just read that tweet on #mumbai. Doesn’t matter what I think; doesn’t matter what we try to control. Smaller pieces, referential posts, a constant rumble of unverifiable reports forming a fog of information in which silhouettes of knowledge loom: These are the elements of the future.
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