Twitter Telepathy happens when a person is thinking about something that happened or is about to happen, checks Twitter, and finds that someone they follow tweeted about the exact same something.  This coincidence, in turn, is linked to another, altogether separate occurrence to which it shares a similar psychic state in the mind (or minds) of the person (or persons) that it effects. Once you get past the “that’s impossible” and “I don’t believe in magic” knee-jerk reactions that many so-called scientific minded people have in the face of events to which there are no readily apparent explanations, it becomes apparent that Twitter is ready-made to be a vehicle for new type of non-causal communication.  The essential timeless asynchronicity (of Twitter as a whole (not as the individual streams that make it up, as I write about here) and rapid-fire pace of the application combine in a functionality that mimics ESP from the outset (a fact that is cited by Twitter on its homepage).

Twitter Telepathy can happen in two different ways:  either a person someone follows tweeted about the same thing at the same time that they were experiencing it, or else they tweeted about it at a different time but the person didn’t see the tweet until the moment just before or after their experience.  The more specific the coincidence, the more likely it’s Twitter Telepathy and not just the usual chatter about current events, or Barack Obama, or any number of trending topics ranging from software application releases to political scandals to the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars.  In addition, it’s always time to eat or drink or make coffee somewhere in the world, so the fact that someone tweets about eating a sandwich at the same time that you take the first bite of yours is not so mindblowing.  If, however, you both bit into your respective sandwiches and crunched down on something hard and possibly tooth cracking—then the connection becomes more specific and the weirdness factor expands.  If once you’re done inspecting your teeth and are about to tweet about the coincidence you refresh your feed and happen to notice that an altogether different person that you follow has just tweeted about a dream they just hadin which all their teeth fell out, then you know you’re really on a roll.

The more specific and non-everyday that the “something” is, the less it feels like merely a coincidence, and more like a communication delivered via an invisible but very REAL and functioning messaging system, like the rivers of data running largely unnoticed beneath city streets and between building walls.

In order to truly attain the WOW factor necessary for there to be Twitter telepathy, it helps if the connection between the synching pair contains another, previously hidden element that is brought to light during the connection over the coincidence.  For instance one is inspired to visit the other’s blog and finds a post or a picture that forms another coincidence—that the two went to the same school, or are both exactly half-way through Infinite Jest. These types of discoveries are only possible with curious half-strangers that a person doesn’t know in “real” life.  Twitter is not merely about duplicating an existing stream of friends online, but creating new ones—the emphasis being on the plural—numerous Twitter streams which a person cultivates to meet the needs of the multiplicity of selves that exists inside each of us as individuals.