Sit down, don't shut-up, and hold on to your smartphone tight: in a little more than 140 characters.
Hello. I want to talk to you about knowledge.
But not just knowledge: information, technology, and social media. - Does it turn you on? Does it make you restless? Do you shift in your seat? Does your head hurt?
Think about how far we've come. Hieroglyphs. Folk tales. Written text. Codex. Moveable type. Teh interwebz. Search engines. Methodic relevance ranking (Google) in such engines.
We tweet and status update and micro-blog. We inform in 140 characters or less. We're in this fast-paced - blink or you'll miss us - age. It's keep up or gtfo. We spend our whole day reading, thinking, typing, searching, creating, working...
And then sleep.
We close our eyes. We close them quickly and hope to god we fall asleep in just enough time to wake-up, refreshed, so that we can keep on keeping up. This isn't Kansas; we don't dream in technicolor; and the only wizard we're familiar with is our software auto-installer. We dream in CSS and Twitter feeds, Tetris blocks and Farmville crops.
We're fed information - news, spoofs, lolcats, reddits, tweets - all by the ladleful and we love it.
I love it.
The soundtrack of our lives consists of IMs, push notifications, chirping, and the quiet hum of the machines that are our lifeline: our lifeline to all that keeps us up-to-date and savvy. Without the seemingly scary pace - at which this bullet train is pulling us by our teeth - where would we be? Back at the last stop? Heh. I don't know about you...but I have no intent of being stuck at that last station. It smells like old technology. It smells slow and less knowledgeable...less shiny.
So, sit down. Don't shut-up. And hold on to your smartphone tight.
We have a lot of information to share.
Written, edited, and presented by Jamie Young. Copyright 2010.