Midnight Pub

Blowing hot and cold.

~peterhd

Lots of parallels here.

This is something old but I do believe with gemini I might have found a new ecology.

Just to riff on some ideas. I have been reading Marshall McLuhan again, particularly "Understanding Media" and doing a bit of side reading on the idea of media ecologies. Trying to place some of my ideas about the web in 'context'.

Within this context Twitter is not so much a paradigm shift as a natural result of the 'Status' in Facebook, as Facebook is a natural result of IRC and IRC a result of BB'ing. On a continum of hot to cold media one can place Facebook as a hot medium and Twitter as a cold medium as exemplified by: "A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be "hot", intensifying one single sense "high definition", demanding a viewer's attention, and a comic book to be "cool" and "low definition", requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.". "McLuhan observes that any medium "amplifies or accelerates existing processes", introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action", resulting in "psychic, and social consequences".

As such Twitter creates a unique media ecology. A 'cool' one requiring 'much more conscious participation..to extract value'. To borrow the phrases, to 'extract value' or 'the essence', one needs to study the ecology of Twitter, the social and psychologicaly effects to see the essence of this 'conscious participation' where it might be leading and thus achieve a headstart on what might possible. The answers one would be looking for would then be: do applications like Feedalizr facilitate this extraction of value and if not what is required? Is there a business model for Twitter or is there a business model for the ecology that Twitter creates?