I have seen the future, and it is Twitter.
Every year the Canadian University Press (CUP) holds a gathering of member student newspapers (though news on ‘paper’ seems to be falling out of fashion). The conference usually lasts a week, and features lectures and round-tables all designed to help the students produce and distribute the best news they can. Attendees are generally young, technology-savvy, and consummate information junkies. They’re perhaps textbook examples of ‘early-adopters’. This year there were over 500 student journalists from 60-some papers from across the country.
Picture a room with hundreds of people in it- hundreds of people that essentially professionalize the practise of gossip. They are left to themselves, so naturally they split off into groups, divided by geographical origin, cultural and linguistic differences, and good old fashioned cliques. Everyone talks with their small group of neighbors. Dozens of relatively small conversations are held, but ideas and consensuses never spread beyond the range of your voice- a voice that gets drowned in the ocean of discussion.
Now imagine a second layer to this room. A conversational web that arcs high over waves of murmuring (or depending on how you look at, pervasively tunnels below it). In this web, people across the room from each other can engage in a public conversation that anyone can follow. Physical location is meaningless. New viewpoints are dropped in by followers of the conversation. Positions are reinforced and amplified by those who agree. Points are contested by those who disagree. Everyone is equal going into the conversation. There is no leader, only a collective stream of thoughts and ideas that, when taken as a whole, can represent the group as a whole.
This is what happened at the CUP conference. Most attendees had access to Twitter, either on their mobile devices or laptops. The hashtag #NASH73 was used by anyone that wanted to be part of the group conversation. The use of other tags relating to speakers, the budget processes, plenary, and group sessions allowed for smaller, sub-conversations.
I’ve seen this happen at other events before. STUSU meetings and concerts usually generate a lot of twitter traffic. But for that week in Montreal something was different. Maybe it was the sheer number of people, maybe it was the percentage of Twitter users. Whatever the reason, it reached a kind of critical mass. Not only did the super-conversation give the conference a new context, but it influenced the actions of people in the physical world.
During a banquet or session there would be a group decision to pull a prank to play or a group game. Suddenly everyone with access would be following along. Those without mobile devices (the unconnected) would sit there confused. I had unconnected people tell me that they felt they were missing out on a whole part of the conference.
The #NASH73 noosphere was pretty benign for the most part. A lot of conversations were civil and lighthearted, save for a few trolls the group learned to ignore. However, there was one night I watched what happens when a collective turns on someone. One evening the keynote speaker was a representative from an independent Quebec newspaper that considers itself one of the most influential in the province. The 55 minute lecture was… well, it was bad. The choice of speaker, topic of discussion, and delivery were all pretty weak.
In a normal (old-fashioned human) situation, most listeners simply would have sat there disliking the speaker in silence. They might have raised their eyebrows at people around them in a general expression of displeasure. At most a few people might have walked out.
The #NASH73 collective reacted differently. Without directly interfering with the speaker, a hundred people were able to express their displeasure with the event publicly. By mid-speech the stream was clogged with different insults and general derision. It seemed like the entire conference denounced the event. Fake accounts were even set up mocking the presenter. By the end of the speech, almost half of the audience had left but they were still able to follow what was going on from their hotel rooms through posts by those still in attendance. The echo-chamber effect was amazing to watch.
I’m sure the idea of groupthink is terrifying to those of you who’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four or seen the Borg of StarTrek. But this seems to be the direction we’re moving. Technology might finally facilitate a true direct democracy, something has become logistically impossible as our populations grow.
Given enough scale, who says future social networks won’t be able to give us an instant snapshot of humanity’s opinion about anything and everything?
Who is to say that 40 years from now elections are history, and governmental policy has the literal “will of the people” composed from our stream of consciousness?
What if criminals weren’t judged by jury or 12 of their peers, but ALL of their peers?
I don’t want to go all GRID on you, but I guess your comparative terror/excitement for this future world comes down to one question:
Will humanity’s noosphere be Good and Just? Do we trust ourselves with ourselves?
