It’s awesome because I can hear about stuff all over the world this way.

Cheers!
Silona

And this…: ‘If twitter is the party room the twitter IS the social instinct’… I like but with the proviso that we are sure not to confuse the map with the territory.

I appreciate this: “the human instinct to sit down and have considered conversations?? how could this ever be instinctual?” It’s a good question which exposes the crack in my argument. I had originally written ‘the instinct of some people to have considered conversations’ but shortened it to ‘the human instinct’. Its not a basic human instinct, its an inclination common to certain personalities and alien to others.

Some people instinctively are drawn to pushing any conversational starter however lightly presented toward something more deeply engaging. I’d count myself amongst those. Others are always skimming the surface and flitting from one to the next as social butterflies. Some call them shallow. Others call them fun.

Perhaps every party needs all sorts of personalities and they combine to make up the personality of the party itself. This sort of thing must be at the forefront of the minds of people designing social software as the architecture of what they are designing will influence the nature of the party along with the types people it attracts who will then integrate with the design to give it a unique character that is often not predictable.

Maybe what we are seeing is different cultures arising on different platforms. And also seeing that great and ancient tradition of one society saying to next “Our culture is superior to yours because we have x,y,z” while the other society says “That may be true. But we have more fun :P”. The great thing about the internet and particularly microblogging is that you can you can slip in and out of conversations at will, like someone bar-hopping, flit from one to the other according to your energy and inclination and what you discover along the way.

IF twitter is the party room then twitter IS the social instinct - and it’s mission is to kill the well learned pattern of having considered conversations. if twitter is the party room, twitter is the unlearning social tool - Instinct is irrational, true and inspiring. Instinct is what happens in the party room or in the kitchen, when your traditional and learned social guidelines are broken, when you’re forced to react and let the magic happens.

Tweets like instinctual actions have no learning curves, they are hard-wired and ready to use and they do depend on some maturational process to appear.