Twitter and Change

It was one of those times when the stars aligned around a particular phenomenon.

Getting away from blogging for a while, I went out last night to the Barnes and Noble at Irvine's Spectrum Center. While there, I read Time's recent cover story, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live."

The technology's impressive, and I've been meaning to get all signed up for some time; but I was impressed with the discussion that placed Twitter in the context of American entrepreneurial dynamism - and especially in the context of economic innovation and first-mover advantages in international political economy:

The speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early '70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-'80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

I just thought this passage was so cool from the perspective of political science.

So coming home last night, I did a little blogging and then signed up. My Twitter username is "AmPowerBlog." I couldn't have joined at a more interesting time. As I was playing around with it, all the big news was coming in from Iran, and the best stuff was on Twitter. I mean really, as I noted today, the biggest names in journalism - especially CNN - went basically AWOL.

Kathleen at RightWingSparkle summed up what it was like last night:

I stayed up until 3am last night reading the tweets on twitter from Iran. It was just fascinating to me that while the Iranian government was trying to block the people from Iran from letting the world know what was happening by trying to shut down all social networking, the people were still managing to tweet and post video on Youtube.

Then, this afternoon, Serr8d linked to an awesome comment at Protein Wisdom regarding the dymamism and creative destruction at the frontiers of social networking:

Here’s my social media exegesis: Mass communications tools, since Gutenberg, have shared a fundamental and foundational commonality; they’re all top-down hierarchies that necessarily result in a unidirectional, linear, deterministic flow of information. The information promulgated through those tools is just that: promulgated. There can be no realistic expectation that the audience can participate. Letters to the editor, for example, are strictly moderated and therefore inauthentic replacements for the kind of communication that typifies natural human interactions.

And these tools have long since jumped the shark. Ask any advertiser and they’ll tell you about the waning effectiveness of TV. @themediaisdying is a twitter user documenting the death of traditional media organizations. Witness the RIAA and MPAA thrashing about in a futile effort to maintain the apparatus of their top-down, breadth-first information promulgating structures ....

In very short order, Twitter will, in my estimation, eclipse Google. Let me offer an example. I arrive in Los Angeles and find myself with time to explore. I consult Google, which tells me about restaurants, museums, and so forth, replete with descriptions, ratings, photos and other static media. It’s the algorithm that makes it possible. Technology delivers this information. It is arms-length information. I don’t know who created this information and I have little in the way of intimacy with those content creators to aid determining their intentions. The information has very possibly been spun by media professionals: publicists, crisis management professionals, marketing copywriters and strategists.

Right now there are around 30 million twitter users. Twitter adoption is growing logarithmically. Just six months ago, there were 6 million twitter users. In six months there could be over 200 million (like facebook, which could qualify it among the top six largest industrial countries in the world). Revisiting my hypothetical, I arrive in Los Angeles and I go to twitter search and now I get suggestions about where to dine and what to see from actual people. I could even tweet a request for suggestions and get an avalanche of answers. I can evaluate those responses the way I would evaluate suggestions from any actual person. I can read their tweets. I can get a sense, quickly, for the their authenticity. Happyfeet could warn me about what joints have the highest prevalence of dirty socialists.

That’s just the most facile and yet useful example. Twitter has directed me to untold number of exceptionally interesting articles, blog posts and people. I’ve met profoundly interesting people like Todd Gailun and I’ve had the chance to talk back to Karl Rove (who authors his own tweets). I’ve been afforded this access by merit of my participation and the knowledge granted has an immediacy that is breathtaking. The plane crash in Denver last December was tweeted by someone on the plane from their phone as it happened. Find someone closer to the story than that! Find a way to obtain such knowledge more quickly!

But back to the paradigm shift and why classical liberals and libertarians must embrace it in my view. We are, I contend, seeing a near perfect recapitulation of the events that transpired in the middle of the 18th century in America and France. Rigid hierarchies are once again being rejected in favor of something more liberal. The backlash represented by everything from post-modernism to adbusters and Naomi Klein to anti-corporatism to just anyone whose worked for a corporation and recognized how soul-crushingly shitty it is to do so, is the same esprit that fueled the American and French revolutions. It is merely playing out in a different venue. To borrow from Jeff, this backlash doesn’t represent a legitimate prescriptive; it is merely a backlash. The solutions offered up by those who have most readily embraced these new social media tools amount to, as Wired puts it, The New Socialism, which is to say, the same old shit. As I mentioned above, socialism is just the other side of the Enlightenment paradigm coin from capitalism.

As these new social tools infiltrate the enterprise, they will subvert the hierarchies that have characterized the management of an enterprise since Adam Smith. I can explain exactly how it will happen because I’ve seen it. I sell enterprise 2.0 / innovation tools and to large organizations. What will rise in replacement of these hierarchies is what remains to be seen. To those socialist economists who say that the market should be managed just like the inside of the enterprise, I say, you have it precisely backward. The market should not be made to look more like the enterprise, the enterprise should be made to look more like the market.

There's more at the link.

By the way, I'm kind of stoked that Allahpundit just now tweeted one of my posts, and it's only my second day on Twitter!