skinnypop:

(note the infinity tat and ties)

I realized that due to their infinite nature, I’d been thinking of Twitter streams as being timeless—but this is not the case.  Time matters on Twitter.  Not all of the same people who are on early in the morning are on late at night.  There are waves of users—one after another the continents wake up, drink coffee, go to work, go out, eat dinner, drink coffee, etc…

This doesn’t mean that the members of a Twitter stream are bound by geography or time zones—all that matters is that they are “on” at the same Twitter stream time—regardless if it’s real world quitting time for one and breakfast time for another.  For instance, I know it’s getting near lunch when my west coast peeps start popping up, still sweetly half-asleep.  We communicate on Twitter together (as an us) in a shared time that hovers over and in-between “real life” schedules.

Despite the fun of stretching out a Twitter conversation over many hours and many days (I’ve had extremely spirited exchanges with peeps in Australia that occur with over 12 hour intervals in between responses) there are also certain advantages to coordinating your Twitter time with the Twitter time of someone else.  For instance, you’re free to “@” reply any public account on Twitter—even a famous person—and the reply will be waiting for them, which they may or may not read.   But if you send the @ shout when you’re both online at the same time then there’s the chance that person might actually see your tweet flash across the screen and feel moved to engage you in a “real time” back and forth.

As a group of people who discovered each other through their mutual following of someone else (or something else, in the case of a trending topic), a Twitter stream is strong if it has a far reach, meaning the content of its users keeps reaching new people. One of the ways this happens is if the stream has amplification activity going on at many different times.  People are retweeting and replying to one another about the content of someone they both follow regardless of whether that person is even online.

For those who are using # signs and other microsyntax for the purposes of propaganda they would do well to chart the times of the day in which their stream is the strongest—and then work from there to get others to tweet during the off hours.

One thing I wouldn’t recommend is using software to auto-tweet your content in intervals spaced out through 24 hours.  That’s because I don’t recommend any auto-tweet software or software that “automatically” increases your number of followers or anything like that.  Twitter is about being there, whenever you can make it—live and direct, in Twitter time.  It could be once a day or a thousand—at 3AM eternal or 24/7…whatever works for you.

If you Tweet what’s real, when it’s real, you’ll never go wrong.

Last week I posted an article on Reality Sandwich about an experiment by Richard Wiseman that tested Twitter out as a tool for remote viewing. I’m excited by new avenues of research such as this that examine the potential of open social media platforms for being possible tools for non-causal, ESP-like communication.  Wiseman wrote an article for New Scientist magazine about the results of a four day trial in which he asked participants to pick the secret location that he spent 30 minutes at out of several randomly chosen alternatives:

In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group’s decision.

If the group were psychic, the majority would vote for the correct target. In the first trial I was looking up at a striking, modern-looking building. Unfortunately, the group voted for some woods.

On trial two I was sitting in the middle of a playground, but the group thought I was standing at the foot of a long stairway. The third trial found me under an unusual-looking canopy; the group voted for a graveyard.

On the final trial I stared intently at a red postbox. The group believed that I was standing at the side of a canal. In short, all four trials were misses.

When I analysed believers and sceptics separately, the results were the same, with no difference between the groups.

So what did we learn? Well, the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing and suggests that those who believe in the paranormal are simply good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target – which is, maybe, why they believe in the first place. No surprises there. So perhaps the most important outcome was to demonstrate that thousands of people are happy to take part in an instant Twitter study. Now it is up to scientists to find other interesting ways of harnessing this new research tool.

My own take on these results is that the participants were too random and unconnected to make the chances for Twitter telepathy likely.  As I’ve written here on this blog, Twitter telepathy is more likely between people who are a part of the same stream, which is to say, people who found and followed each other through their mutual following of someone else and don’t know each other in real life or through other Twitter connections.  It’s not magic but the adaptation of parallel association processes between these ostensible strangers (who have in common their shared following of someone else) that allows for uncanny occurrences such as tweeting the same thing at the same time, or reading a tweet that was nearly exactly the same to one you were about to write—or how it more than occasionally is the case that someone in one of your streams will tweet a link to an article or blog post that is exactly what you were looking for at that exact moment—moreover, the answer comes before you can even fully formulate the question or the search term to Google.

Whether these “coincidences” supply practical information or spiritual salvation, the connections that create them are so interwoven and invisible so as to make it seem like magic—or like the group think of a flock of birds, or the way it will happen that people from different parts of the world come up with the same idea at the same time—or how once one person breaks a world record in sports there are suddenly many people who are able to do it, one after another.

I think it would be interesting to do another version of this same remote viewing experiment within streams—for example, all of those who are members of the Scoblelizer stream, or the #P2 peeps.  I predict that the results would be an above average number of correct responses in picking out the correct location.

(“Night Vanity” by Evan Gruzis )

Life on open social media platforms flows continuously without beginning or end.  There are no season finales, sequels or prequels.  The streams are in a constant state of flux. They consist of users who are both helping to define it and being defined by it as they oscillate in and out of the various streams of which they are members. There is a refusal to stay in one place—a nomadic sense of being at home by not being at home (i.e., the call of The Road).  That’s usually one of the first Twitter epiphanies that a new user has—the realization that hey, I can be in several places at once! In real life I might be someone stuck inside a coffin-like cubicle, but on the internet I can mix worlds with the effortless beauty of a painter mixing paint.  I can exist at the intersections between Silicon Valley and next level Evolvers—I can follow DJs and politicians and poets—I can tweet something interesting and go viral like a youtube video.  In real life I might be quiet and calm and outwardly accepting of all that happens but online I’m a moving, surfing force, straddling the space between subject and verb—I’m blooming a million ways at once—bursting forth in the extravagance of NOW until I’m no longer me and yr no longer u.