Streaming the Metamedia: Tweetwerverse, Mimezines, Streaming Cyber Consciousness and Extension of Us In Datasphere

Twitter and Twitterverse Are An Extension of Ourselves

"Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140-characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter Website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was found in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp. In April 2007, Obvious LLC spun off the service as a separate entity under the name Twitter, Inc. with Jack Dorsey as CEO. (Twitter)."

Being a newbie and having had a shortened encounter and participation with this new medium known as the Twitter, I was awestruck by what I have found in its that Data sphere whilst cruising the W.W.W. Stream. This Hub are my impressions using the Tweeter- the one on the whiteand a light Blue background icon or APP(Application?) and is fast churning put some modern social media theoretical spins, memes. zines, and empowerment of the user. Tweeter-speak information or data spewing social network and coordination thereof, is spreading out like our nervous system is patterned in our bodies, also, spreading like the Universe is growing and barreling into the Spaces' Dark Matter. The rate and generation of "Tweets", depends on who you "Follow" or "Unfollow", and is replete with many social networking interaction, intra-action, Retweeting and posting or venting and ranting-at times some use aphorisms and in the process are affects and effects that turn this "Socail Networking Beast" into a complete "enveloping experience", and spreading, borne out of engaging and addicting new forms of communication enabled by the internet and all the new and emerging Gizmos, and in the process empowering the Users.It is also a new way of communicating all sorts of ideas and data by ordinary rich/poor. literate, illiterate, suave or ignorant/rural/city slicker, you add your understanding, the global scene that is the Tweeter, has transformed the way we live our live on Earth, do business, fights, communicate, think, acquire knowledge, disseminate information or Data, interact, interconnect, intra-communicate and go viral, merge and submerge in the Data Soup. It does not matter, there is this transformation of an industrial society into a fully functional Technological society of the Jacque Ellul mode, the Twitter has introduced anew and unique way of handling, processing and distributing memes, zines and information circulation . On Board the Twitter is the world community in haste to inform, connect follow, find follower, send youtube streams, News agency with their streams bringing news and others peddling their wares within the context or space of 141 letters, broaden and make the Twitter user-friendly to their adherents. Because I am new, as of writing of this Hub at this point, I have received over 1200 tweets in an hour, The memes, zines and raw data and information in the stream are overwhelming; the messages, information, Data, public relations posts, all sorts of relations interactive probes, Musicians hawking their wares, Record stores selling and promoting vinyl, and all other paraphernalia of their productions, and then there are people who stream using famous quotations with their family, friends, other followers; others cull from all sorts of media sources and outlets and Tweet it by positing links through RTs,to groups of followers, or those of the one who Tweets Follow, big companies in the media and those big companies using the medium to their own end- are all what gives Tweeter the Bubbly-like effect, boomeranging and spread-eagled infiltration throughout the world is all about. Thus far, these are my impressions as to what I have learned from the Twitter. I will further break this down below as to what these impressions have gleaned to me about the new inter and intra-communication, submerging/converging medium: Twitter.

It seems that the information glut and its speedy flow creates forgetfullness and constant need to be satisfied as at it pops and spirals to the receiver and at the speeds tantamount to that of the spreading and growing Universe. Information gathering and knowledge seems to have come down to a 100-1000 per second delivery to the receiver, who has to inter- and intra-connect- merge and submerge to, latch on by login in or out in the streaming viral and primordial tweeterverse, wherein a user, upon receiving tweets they retweet to their followers and newcomers from ones Twitter recepticle with a name, picture and the information the Twitterer has virally cloned into the Web through disseminating the Data-glut and recycling or relaying the screen popping information or Data which comes at incredible and excellent speeds, and need response and one to respond to- or one to depose or repose of it in proscribed ways that are germane to the Twitter; some have resorted to filling up their Tweeter communicative space with links and connection, grouping them in many and infinite orders; others tweet whole batches of information at the rate of a minute or less a tweet- purveying and throwing our mimezines and clogging the Cyber Space and Cyber consciousness. It is better at thhis juncture we learn a liitle bit about these message systems and meanings. Douglass Rushkoff explains Mimezines and Zines this way

Mimezine

"Take the virtual reality meme. While any convincing application of this technology is still years away. VR as an idea has brought together a wide assortment of countercultural figures. Timothy Leary and other psychedelics advocates immediately recognized the association between the virtual world and the acid trip. They both provided the user with access to a new world, apparently unbound by the laws of physical reality. Likewise, once people learn to make a fantasy true in a virtual or hallucinatory world, they bring back with them and inkling of how to create the same reality in the physical world. The more people feel free to design reality, the more influence they will begin to have on the systems with which they interact.[I would swear that this was the coming of the Twitter- my addition] The spiritual connectedness people experienced on LSD in the sixties translated into the antiwar movement, a rebirth of radical politics and spirituality and eventually the feminist, environmental, and New Age movements... the memes of psychedelics, spirituality and revolution seem inextricably linked to virtual reality(VR)'. Leary himself is most responsible for spreading awareness about the technology, as he toured the United State and Japan demonstrating and lecturing on VR throughout the late eighties. Sirius's Mondo 2000 magazine, which brought VR into the printed media, was most famous (in its previous incarnation as High Frontiers magazine) for its bold description of psychedelics and their effects, as described by men like Leary, William Burrough, Terence McKenna, and John Lily. By bringing the memes of computers and drugs into the same place, Sirius linked forever the ideas of psychedelic hallucination and virtual reality simulation. An interesting way that will help humans to deal with the new technologies and realities that we see happening in the form of the Twitter and other Social Media."

Rushkoff further explains the ways and means and modus operandi of the viral World and reality functions and how this envelopes our extended selves and subverted consciousness:

Rushkoff writes: "To get these memes on mass media, to develop "Wild Palms" from a comic book morphed into a fully-fledged self-similar media world, complete with a companion book to explain the background and details. Stone and Wagner enlisted some of the leading meta-media theorists around today. To invent the detail of the psychedelic drug, mimezine , they hired Gary Henderson, a Bay Area expert on designer chemicals and founder of Yang sportswear-a company that advertises "Clothing for Altered States" on the back cover of Mondo 2000. Even the name of the drug-mimezine is meant to evoke consideration of memes- or create the reality of a techno-spiritual cult. Stone needed to present them-as did Donahue-in most sensationalistic possible light. While his own hopes for our culture are based in the psychedelic visions of Bob Dylan, The Doors, and other sixties poets and philosophers, only the hard-edged grim cyberterrorism of "Wild Palms" could successfully package these ideas into a marketable viral shell. But under the soap opera veneer of "Wild Palms" hid an army of metamedia activists whose own lifelong efforts at cultural conversion are just beginning to be realized. Contributing to the commercial but meme-aware filmmakers like Stone, watered-down their own agendas,but slowly and meticulously prepared popular culture for future viral infection." What we see as Twitters and other social media, had their beginnings according to the narrative laid down and as described above by Rushkoff.

According to Rushkoff, Gary Henderson Radzik, an engineer came about with this Gaia hypothesis when he pondered that: "Nature just decided, 'Okay, if I want to get conscious, I'm gonna need technology to do it because these people don't have clear enough minds to use telepathy. They are too-cluttered.' Technology is an extension of nature, but people don't see it that way." to help people understand and cooperate with Gaia's plan to link humanity together through media, Jody decided to promote the memes of chaos math. "The biggest cultural enemy," according to Jody," is fear". Tadzik's own guiding light in the development of his chaos ideologies has been Goddess Kali: "Kali represents the universe. She's got a sword and a severed head in her hand, and she's really scary, but she's also offering a blessing, 'Fear not. I know it Iooks scary as shit, but its's cool. If you approach me with humility I'm gonna take care of you. Don't worry about it. It's frightening, but if you go with the flow, your gonna be okay.' For me, the fractal and chaos attracotrs say the same thing. They show that random systems have limits to their behaviors. There's a 'from there',out they are beautiful. Have no fear. There is comfort. Plus, I thought that they just looked cool". This gives us the ideas as to how we are as comfortable with the Twitter and other social media outlets because the conception of the Twitter came before the actual Twittering that we all experts of, today.

Rushkoff clarifies thus: "Radzik chose the symbols of viruses and chaos math for three reasons. The looked cool, they were technology promoting, and they had magical connotations. His intention was to wed the memes of chaos with the memes of viral invasion-this would bring his culture into a greater awareness of the frightening-looking methods Gaia is using to bring us together while keeping people reassured and comforted." Through the use of 'self-justified memes used for "the sending out of a virus and that it is about the power of the subliminal imagery, they were able to provoke such tremendous cultural response. It showed that people really believed in the power of cultural memes as countercultural propaganda. The virus is able to play upon the paranoia of the imbibers of that media. Metamedia, the map of our collective cultural perceptions is reality, and the way you navigate that reality is through the media. The strange attractors in this huge chaotic landscape are the identifiable gaps or blind spots in our ability to cooperate with each other. These are the lapses in the collective project we call culture, and they are gaping receptor sites for media viruses." (Rushkoff) Our culture is a perfect receptacle for the streams of the Metamedia to infiltrate and subvert our subliminal consciousness to cyber consciousness.

In this Hub, we will look much closely as to what has been alluded to by Rushkoff and my opening remarks about the Tweeterverse and its nitty-gritty. "Twitter was first conceived of and developed by software engineer Jack Dorsey through his podcasting company, Odeo, Inc (which later became the Obvious Corp.). Dorsey's goal in creating the service was to be able to compete in the DMS (Short message Service) market. In March of 2006, Dorsey sent the first test official tweet of his service: "just setting up up my Twttr" (Twttr being short for form for Twitter). Later that year, Dorsey and Evan William established Twitter.com and hired the familiar social media icons of Biz Stone and several others to help run the company. In April of 2007, Twitter incorporated itself, becoming the organization it is today (Glasser, 2007)

The Twitter and the Twitterverse

The Twitter is categorized as a microblogging web application that allows users to connect to one another through tweets. Tweets are are short 140-character messages that are sent publicly to individuals) commonly called followers), or privately via direct messages (much like e-mail). Those who send messages are commonly called tweeters or twitterers. Tweeters answer a simple question: What are you doing?"; this prompt helps facilitate the creation of de-centralized, open social networks as opposed to centralized, closed networks. Some people just follow other tweeterers, looking at their tweet stream for interesting information, but others engage in conversations they find compelling or valuable for some reason,'. In 2006 and 2007, Twitter held steady at a few million tweets per day. in 2008, awareness of Twitter by Americans 12 years and older was just at 5%. In January of 2009 though, the service began to boom in the marketplace and by January of 2010 it exploded to upwards of 10 million tweets per day. This explosion was not without without consequences, most notably the inability to handle the amount of tweets sent and the inclusion of the infamous Fail Whale (Schroeder, 2009). Twitter has over 105 million registered users, an 87% awareness among those 12 years and older, attracts 190 million visitors per month, and generates 65 million tweets per day (Edison Research, 2010; Schonfield, 2010). These statistics will be quite different as of writing of this Hub, and this is due to the fact of the ever-changing nature of all social media, and specifically the evolution of the Twitter today.

Twitters growth and immense popularity has produced a plethora of third-part applications that allow users to access their accounts from smart phones and portable [emerging] media devices as well as their computers, both PC and Mac (desktop and laptop). Several more popular programs include TweetDeck. Nmabu (currently only for Mac) Seesmic, HootSuite, Twitterlator, and Twitterific. In addition,there are services like bit.ly, and tinyurl.com that shorten URLs for tweets, and Twitpic, Yfrog, or Twitvid that post photos and/or videos (Faculty focus, 2010). Twitter has spawned its own cottage industry,carving out a niche for those specializing in microblogging. Twitter in not generally known as a place for logical disputation, and the size limitations of Twitter messages place strong restrictions on the type of content that they can carry, but it is a purveyor of conveyer of data and information trends. Twitter messages are restricted to 140 characters or less, a requirement that was originally adopted to make it possible to send and receive twitter messages using cell phone SMS networks. Because of this restriction, it is difficult to sustain prolonged arguments that depend on multiple argumentative moves and citation of evidence. While Twitter users have demonstrated the service's ability to share facts like breaking news(Kwak et al, 2010, Malice, 2009) has transformed the Twitter-from its message length, to the lack of persistence of conversation to be sustained, along with reasoned arguments using the service difficult. Despite these restrictions, however, some of the messages in the data set took the form of traditional logical structures such as enthymemes, albeit very simple ones." We know that the Twitter enables persuasive responses of the users in and through the memes developed through streaming. This motion and modus operandi has been discussed as to its beginnings above. Now we se it as of its application in the contemporary Twitter, Web facilitated, enabled and assisted.

Affected Effects

As it was previously pointed out, one of the features of text is that it is always present, while oral speech is not. That is, text has permanence that oral speech cannot attain. At the same time, most analysts implicitly assumed writing and reading were more or less a non-immediate experiences, involving distant encoding and deferred decoding. Reading and writing allow students to learn and even emulate literary or historical works on which the culture presumably depends. It should be obvious, given the audience's reaction, that Zuckerberg and Lacy failed to persuade their audience of the abilities as speakers, the importance of the communication, and so on. This had an effect of affecting its particular users of this social media/medium and the the audience attending the interview to be decontextualized-and therefore, able to be replicated to other, non-particular audiences-in its embodiment on the work. Placed against their failure to persuade this particular audience were the numerous critiques of Zuckerberg and Lacy by the members of the Twitter network(Twitterverse),many of which were presented as refutation of the speaker's claims. While the audience critique featured a substantial number of personal attacks on the speakers, the many logical critiques of their claims were often overlooked by commentators (Hinckley, 2008; Scoble,, 2008), and these critiques played a role in the audience being persuaded of their overall failure."

The mobilizing effects of the Twitter on its audience was displayed in the case just discussed. Zuckenberg and Lacy had not yet learned how the Twitter will work, affect and effect its users, and what those users will react like or perceive their Keynote address as being like. It would be instructive at this point to look much more closer as to how the Twitter works. "As it was previously pointed out , one of the features of text is that its always present, while oral speech is not. The Zuckerberg-Lacy interview is unique as a social media case study in that the participants were both members of a traditional audience as well as readers and writers participating in a social network. This audience was a constant theme of the Twitter network, as numerous Twitter users noted the reactions of the audience during the interview. "Interviewer asks about Zuckerberg's tendency to fire execs. Audience member in my row asks 'Can we fire *you* from this session?'" Similarly, after Zuckerberg responded to the one of Lacy's questions with a mildly snarky response, shame posted, "YES!!! Zuck just nailed her and the audience clapped for a minute!" These messages, and other like them, helped to reinforce the sense of some Twitter user that the speakers' performance was being universally derided by members of the physical audience. While Miller and Charney (2007), following Ong (1991), point out that audiences or oral performances are "a present and participating collectivity" while readers of texts "are a distant and fragmented plurality(Ong), in this case a significant portion of the audience was both. These are some of the outcomes that precipitated the growth and usage of the Twitter by a community of Twitterers. This dual status of many audience members led to the interesting result of the "distant and fragmented plurality" of readers becoming instead a largely unified group that accepted the proposition to others not in attendance at the event. As the reactions to the interview on Twitter became more extreme-and the audience reveled in their role as commentators criticizing the speakers-this led to a feedback loop, a kind of group identification in which the audience joined in solidarity against Zuckerberg and Lacy in particular." This is of note because we should remember that the Twitter users are a "fragmented plurality", but maintain the plural power to affect and effect outcomes when they descend upon their prey in unison, though independently. This is one of the new ways of communication ushered-in by the users of the Twitter and the through the Wb and on the Twitter site.

Because Zuckerberg and Lacy failed to intervene, or even merely interact, with the backchannelThe users of the Twitter in Tweetervese, their silence served to reinforce this "us" versus "them" mentality. The participating collectivity of the audience used the powerful writing tools available to them in the form of the 'social network' to express their discontent. For example, after an audience outburst in which one audience member shouted, "Beacon sucks!" at the stage-a critique of a failed, widely derided Facebook advertising venture-the audience member who yelled posted to Twitter, "He [Zuckerberg] comes to SXSW interactive. He should expect and interactive keynote. Sorry if I offended, but not really that sorry." Like this user, many members of the audience expected an interactive keynote, and because that was not what they were presented with (and because they were so unhappy with what they did get), they revolted against the speakers, using Twitter as the primary means by which they identified with each other in opposition to them. (Miller/Charney, 2007) This is one of the many cases that were to come wherein the Twitter became a hand tool for the users to sway consent which they might view as negative, or, they know, will bring a positive outcome to their displeasures and disagreement with the spinners of information, news, data and so on. Recall the SOPA saga and its debacle.

The Innards of the Twitterverse

If all communication is inherently perfomative, what social media services like Twitter add to the textual and written communication is their immediacy (or the sense of immediacy) inherent in oral performance. At the same time,most analysts implicitly assumed writing and reading were more or less non-immediate, experiences, involving distant encoding and deferred decoding. Reading and writing allow students to lear and even emulate literary or historical works on which the culture presumably depends. therefore, these tasks were subject to more careful planning, seemed to depend on "higher" mental functions, and seemed more important to teach and learn. There were obvious differences of presence, too. It does not matter where the book was written from but what it does it gives one a peripherally connected to the authors choice to write it. Writing therefore is considered a solitary act of recreation and, except in an imaginative sense. In fact, a central myth of literature has always been the inspired, tortured, or bemused author who sat alone creating new worlds on pages that, after they were transported, became potent enough to move isolated readers to joy, to tears, or to action.

Once we reached the technological watersheds of the telegraph (which made writing and reading more interactive and spontaneous in an extended way" and the radio (which made speaking and listening spontaneous even when communicators were distant) in media history, our communications distinctions became more blurred. The speaking/listening arena, however, continued to be more immediate, spontaneous, multi-sensory, and above all, social. The arena of writers/ was still largely a "deferred" one in which reading is often radically divorced from writing in time and space; writing and reading, therefore, encouraged styles that were often self-consciously strategic, unisensory, oriented toward persuasion, and, above all, individualized and often idiosyncratic. Writers spinout webs of thought and reasoning for their readers that listeners wold never put up with from speakers, especially in an electronic age. Written and spoken modes offered their own advantages, of course. speech, especially in face-to-face situations, provides more holistic clues to meaning, including a speaker's appearance, vocal tone, and gestures. Written texts invite, presume, and, in fact, shape a more linear rationality. Newspapers have placed themselves at the nexus of vast networks of context, and have been able to spin out complicated stories and nuances that broadcasters can only hint at. Still, in the midst of this change, what never seemed to change was that the point of origin, in effect, of news and entertainment-of information-was always 'out there'. Someone, elsewhere had to decide that I needed to know what they wanted to say or write. Audiences, in a sense, were at the beck and call of message producers. In the process, they became consumers in the functional sense, into the service of communication entrepreneurs.

One more idea and thought to be added is the fact that, whereas message receivers have been writing on the senders throughout the century, the basic vocabulary of communication's conventional wisdom is called into question by the new deferred digital presence of on-line networks. The new and emerging environment emphasizes messages that do not necessarily seem directed or aimed at receivers at all, messages that seem somehow to "float" between people. floating messages function in ways similar to how human speech is accessible to any listener within earshot. Whereas directed messages presuppose the sender's (preceded) purposes, floating messages presuppose the listener's (potential) purposes. Reading in such an environment,it seems, takes on central characteristics of listening, with interesting consequences for presence and immediacy. That is why below I will talk about what it might all mean.

Viral Twittering and Listening.

Twitter is a social medium that allows individuals to share short messages with a network of other users. As with other social network sites. Twitter users establish connection via the mechanism of Following, and it appears that these users interact with each other in unique ways ways compared to other, similarly configured sites (Huberman, Romero, & Wu, 2009). When someone follows another user on Twitter, his or her messages are displayed in a unified feed, or timeline. Twitter users can initiate conversations through the use of @replies (i.e., @johnmjones) or through tagging their messages by placing a number sign, oh hashtag, in front of a keyword or phrase (#SXSW). With these tools-followed lists, @replies, and hashtags- Twitter users are able to monitor messages as they appear on the network. There is evidence in the data set to suggest that users followed Zuckerberg-Lacy interview backchannel this way. For example, near the end of the interview, a user who goes by the name Maslowbeer posted the following message, "had to remove my Treo's battery because i made the mistake of tracking #zuckerberg and #scsw during the interview." Like maslowbeer, mobilediner posted that he or she was "liking the live tweets from Zuckerberg keynote," while ms_sloanev used @reply to inform mjlambie that he or she would give you the highlights of Zuck keynote (if there are any)." In short, it is clear that individuals were using Twitter to track the interview, both by posting messages about the interview and actively seeking out similar posts from other users. This conversational use of the Twitter backchannel was the basis of the persuasive uses of Twitter during the interview (Kwak, Lee, Park and Moon, 2010). (With a few exceptions, Twitter users are referred to by their usernames, and their messages will be presented as they are posted to the site, leaving typos and other grammatical oddities intact).

The Twittering Haze

Miller and Charney (2007) argue that writing has four unique effects when compared with oral communication: first, writing alters "the particularity of an oral situation," (p.54) replacing it with the "decontenxtualized and universalized space" (p. 584) of the text; second it emphasizes logic over the direct persuasion of an audience, replacing what "an immediate audience is willing to accept [with] what any rational hearer should accept; third, it "transforms an audience into readers" who must be addressed as a decontextualized abstraction rather than a particular group of individuals; and, finally, it "transforms performance into text. The argument is that social media represents a hybrid of 'oral' and 'written' communication, demonstrating the features of both, Communication via social media often retains the particular nature of oral communication, for example, users of social networking sites frequently only interact with a small group of friends who they know offline (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), yet the fact that their messages are inscribed on such platforms make those messages susceptible to the "decontextualized and universalized space" (Miller & Charney, 2007). In other words, the context in which the reader finds a particular text can be divorced from the context for which the author originally wrote it." Twitter deconstructs that reality and brings forth a new way of human communications in combined way of reading and text decontextualizing content because it has become a floating meme susceptible to be interpreted on received or known in a context far from its originally intended context.

Twittering Mode As Social Media Glue

Miller and Charney (2007) make the following two claims as to "how writing alters the dynamic between audience and speaker established by oral performance. First, they claim that "text fixes meaning in ... that discourse ceases to be an event" but rather "becomes a proposition," and, second, citing (Ricoeur 1981), they state that "written text dissociates propositional meaning from authorial intention," allowing it to "achiev[e] a kind of autonomy. They argue that, then, that oral performance is "an event" and the meaning of that 'event' is attached to "authorial intention," or the speaker's will to communicate. This characterization is placed against writing, which is propositional and disconnected from the intentions of the author in that it can be read or otherwise consumed independently of it's author once the text is inscribed. Social media combine these affects, mingling the immediate-or the feeling that one is witnessing an event that is directly connected to a particular speaker or speakers-with the propositional. This leaves social media users with the impression that the propositions in questions are doubly true, by virtue of their being both immediate and permanent. This combination of immediacy and permanence is detectable in the critique of Lacy's interviewing techniques by the Twitter audience. Audience members were convinced that she was not interviewing Zuckerberg well, and this opinion is evident in a message in which he /she tells Lacy, "FEEL THE ROOM. THEY HATE THE QUESTIONS YOU ARE ASKING." All the Twittering came from the "audience of Twittering a*******," . "These results were in many cases attributable to the unique feature of social media, which in this case, combined the features of oral and written communication by means of networking technology (Scoble, 2008)

Social media are both particular and universal, allowing for direct, timely interactions between users whole also preserving those interactions just as writing preserves communication. Social media are both specifically persuasive, in that they deal with an immediate audience, and also susceptible to the logical claims of the universal, rational audience. Because Zuckerberg and Lacy failed to persuade their immediate audience, it was relatively easy for that audience to be convinced of the rational (irrational) claims written in the Twitter network. Social media also erase the distinctions between audiences, agains mixing the 'particular' with the 'universal'. Finally, social media are both performative and propositional, combining the features f oral performance with the permanence of textual output and the seeming solidity that this permanence lends to communication. The dualistic and plural nature of the Twitter qualifies it as a completely new way of inter/intra-personal communication in the realm of human and additionally, that of the technological gadgetry in their being able to converge and submerge affording the users independently, community divergent and convergent possiblities that make it a favorite amongst its users. This glues the disparate decontextualized users into a an extended and diversified manner coherent with the community of Twitterers

Personalization; Interactivity; Engagement & Collaboration: Twitter

Having cited and culled extensively from Noor Al-Den and Hendricks with their referenced support of their postulation about the Twitter, we now examine the Twitter as to how it presently working. In this case, I will use my own observation and citations, along with participation into the Twitterverse to elicit some changed or unforeseen challenges and operations as we head into 2012 and beyond. But before we do that, we will try and put the discourse discussed above by various social media writers as to how it ties in with the introductory remarks I have made in the open salvo of this diatribe.

Having now gotten the parameters of the functioning of the Twitter and its users or twitterers, we are now face to face what Rushkoff spoke about: the psychelidization of the Twitter audience as they are bombarded by streamed data with abundant alacrity and constancy. The "particularity of an oral situation, replaced by the "decontextualized and universal space" of what the replacement of "an immediate audience is willing to accept] what any rational hearer should accept and ends up "transforming an 'audience' into readers", by "transforming performance into text". Through this mode of operation, the Twitter is is affecting its users personally, through interactivity, engagement and collaboration. By unleashing such power to the audience and individual user, data become decentralized and decontextualized in space and time: on the gizmos from where the audience exercises this power. The audience automatically become disseminators of viral messages and splurge them into the Datasphere with all types of meta media as outlets. They use their power of selection and other intra-communication techniques and machine applications to make viral any issue to their desire and immediacy as an advantage. There are other aspects as what I will call "Twitterpersonal' interactive interaction which the scripted messages stream and being regulated with the blocking technique for those Twittering long, segmented and short message about issues of society, business and so on.

As has been discussed above, the audience in the Twitterverse is functioning within a burgeoning and expanding social media entity which gives them anonymity or exposure, which in either case, they retain the power of affecting information dissemination to another level that they were never able to before the coming of the Twitter. People not only receive Tweets, but they use the information to inform their followers and this snowballs into a constant viral feed to individuals in the world and socially gathering everything from the Tweeterverse. That is the kind of the individual power we are talking about. Used to be News Agencies were the Gatekeepers of news dissemination, now, ordinary individuals tweet links for their follower to check up, in real time and with further links, which the audience selects and spread to others, and so goes the memes, mimezines, ethymemes, zines and data which which when streaming extends many in more ways and still is growing and continues to endlessly flow in the Web's viral bowels and tentacles, becomes immediate and permanent and personalized.

Inter/Intra Activity and Access

The Rearview Mentality In a technological Environment

Access ... signifies the ability to do what everybody else can do and to make use of what everybody can use; access means the liberty to take advantage of resources. (Wurman, 1990) We are also informed by Heim that "The abundance lies not only in the manipulation of text on one's own computer and data storage but also in the magical word which will replace libraries: access. As we have seen in previous discourses, the nature of digital text is characterized by linkage and in an essential way." The way we view and consume the media has totally changed and is still in a state of flux.

We now confront a new watershed of technology. Some have called it time when we can look simultaneously backward and forward in order to recognize the varying influences of both "old media" and "new media(rice & Associates, 1984); Taylor & Saarinen, 1994) Looking backward, we see the modernizing influences of transmitted packages, as Berger and Kellner describe.. This "Directedness Theory", i.e., looking forward, we see newer media that operate by the very different assumptions of what appears to be an access theory. The new media stress certain characteristics more than older forms like print, radio, film, or television. Several interdependent characteristics are especially important

They involve computers at basic levels of person(s)-with-persons(s) connection. Consider:

• The shift from isolated single-author writing to "word processing," which often involves multi-author manipulation of texts (Heim, 1987);
• Shopping via the World Wide Web or researching via online database like Lexis/Nexis or Dialog;
• Highly interactive, talk-like writing via e-mail and electronic bulletin board services.

2. They involve merged media,merged human senses, and thus more immersive experiences. Consider:

• The extend to which satellite digital technology, computers, and phone lines have merged to facilitate viewer participation with, and control over, a myriad of specialized television channels;
• how "virtual reality" simulations immerse individuals' experience immediately in sensations that both are, and aren't, "present"-how virtual travelers can at the same time "be there" without living "here" (Rheingold, 1991).

3. They shift means responsibilities, thus involving audiences more as co-authors than as receivers Consider:

• the branching choices invited by hypertext software, the versatile vastness of CD-ROM technology, and the multitude of "user" -determined choices in videodisks and CDs, all of which make messages available differently to different persons (in some new fiction, the question for the "reader/listener" isn't. "how does the story end"," but "how do my choices shape the ending?."
• messages that once were intended to serve a single purpose are now literally multifaceted and suggest multiple meanings (the programmers' work is infinitely reprogrammable by others); in terms of discourse, we are moving, in other words, from a modern era of statements and certainty into a "postmodern" era of questions, ambivalences, and linkages.

4. They rearrange time and place sensibilities. Consider:

• The linear 'cause-to-effect' and 'here-to-there' assumption of directness theory have given way to more multi causal views and message ambiguities;
• previous assurances of what is and isn't real no longer seem to apply. Where, for example, is the "original" message in an e-mail system to found. When I send one e-mail to one person and what's called on my system a "cc" ('carbon-or complimentary-copy') of it to another person, neither literally is n original, and neither copy,because both are composed at the same time, available to addressees at the same time, and their texts are indistinguishable apart from the headings. As each is sent, what's on my screen vanishes (unless I explicitly save a "copy"-of what?-for myself!). For the first time in the history of human communication, texts can be both originals and copies simultaneously. In other words, our former habits of talking about communication are outmoded.

5. They blur the traditional modern concepts of power and responsibility. Consider:

• it used to be clear that to 'respond" to a message, someone else needed to "author" it first.When revolutionary movements took over countries, they seized centers of message production (newspapers, broadcast facilities) first, because power meant the ability to control message production. Now, increasingly, the respondents-to the presence of databases, for example-re author, reconfigure or edit messages at will. Although persons seeking power have always sought to control access to information, anyone now interested in power must consider access first, not just as a consequence of message production. Corporate employees who are fired unexpectedly sometimes get their first clue when their e-mail account can't be accessed;
• It's harder with all this in mind to conceptualize brainwashing or propaganda as the imposition of outside or centralized authority on the will of helpless citizens; more worrisome is an information poverty in some social groups based upon differential access to common resources (Barlow, 1995) Propaganda is no more the issue because those who provide information, have no control as to its dissemination, and

Virtual Listening and Mediated Communications Means

In order for us to fully understand who tweets and why, we will defer to Palfrey and Gasser who writes: "Interestingly enough, the champion of Twitter is not the digital native: those born after 1980, when social digital technologies ... came online. Nor is it just the business savvy advertising executive. Twitter is used by businesses, government agencies, professors, journalists, Artists, Musicians, Celebrities and public relations practitioners. Parents and grandparents are also getting on the Twitter bandwagon, and media personalities alike. Twitter is spreading everywhere, spreading faster than gossip about a celebrity foible. But who exactly is tweeting and why are they doing it? this is something that public opinion research companies are beginning to ask themselves (among other things). According to a 2010 Pew Internet & American Life Project (Smith & Rainie, 2010) research report (run by Pew Research Center), 8% of American adults who go online use Twitter than older adults; minorities (African-Americans and Latinos) are twice as likely to use Twitter as White users; and urban residents are twice as likely to use Twitter as rural users. finally, 24% of Twitter users check their account several times per day, while 21% never check it (Smith & Rainie, 2010)

And what do tweeters tweet? Again, according to the Pew (Smith & Rainie, 2010) report, here are the top categories:

• Updates to personal life, activities or interests; Work-related activities; Sharing links to news stories; Posting humorous or philosophical observations about life; Re-tweet material from other tweeters; send message to people; share photos and videos, and tweet their location.
• In other words, people tweet pretty much anything and everything. An article on Bit Rebels tries to answer this question from a non-scientific perspective. Belardo (2010) delineates seven different types of tweeters, including:

The Content Provider; The Twitter DJs; The Retweeter; The Time and Weather Announcers, The quotes and Inspiration Giver; The Help Brigade; The Conversationalist [I add the Facilitators; Occupiers; Revolutionaries, etc.).

Within this confluence of activities, of users and activists, etc., we have the Facilitator: they utilize Twitter as am means to both enrich and augment their traditional fa-to-face or other mediated communications. Facilitators ask and answer questions, provide links, argue, offer commentary, follow up o statements, begin and add to conversations, and the like. For them, Twitter becomes a tool that enables immediacy among vast virtual networks of individuals and groups. In creating, maintaining and enhancing their online relationships, Facilitators see Twitter as a means to an end of sorts. Tweets are perceived as part of the e transactional dialogue between multi participants in a de-centralized digital network. Facilitators are managers of information, of relationships, and of tact. They know how and why Twitter manages the communication process and uses it to their advantage. Some people, though, use Twitter for the distinct purpose of providing information on new products or tweet random thoughts. They inhabit one typology dominantly but can switch depending on purpose. so that, understanding the types of users is much like utilizing Kolb's 1984 learning styles (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation) or experimenting with the ways in which humans encounter and utilize new knowledge (visually, aurally, tactilely, etc.). So that, the Twitter is a completely new way which extends orality, reading and text into one wormhole of metamedia communication

Reading And Listening Virtual Digital Data

Ong's "Secondary Orality"

We now explore as to how typography orality and the 'internalization' collides or melds with electronic to move the communications paradigm into the coming centuries and millennium. Ong elaborates these issues , albeit briefly, thus: "The electronic transformation of verbal expression has both deepened the commitment of the word to space initiated by writing and intensified by print and has brought consciousness to a new age of secondary orality. ... Despite what is sometimes said, electronic devices are not eliminating printed books but are actually producing more of them. Electronically taped interviews produce "talked" books and articles by the thousands which would never have seen print before taping was possible. The medium here reinforces the old, but of course transforms it because it it fosters a new, self-consciously informal style, since typographic folk believe that oral exchange should normally be informal (oral folk believe that oral exchange should normally be formal). Moreover, as earlier noted, composition on computer terminals is replacing older forms of typographic composition, so that soon virtually all printing will be done in one way or another with the aid of electronic equipment. And of course, information of all sorts electronically gathered and/or processed makes its way into print to well the typographic output. Finally, the sequential processing and spatializing of the word, initiated by writing, and raised to a new order of intensity by print, is further intensified by the computer, which maximizes commitment of the word to space and to (electronic) local motion, and optimize analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous.: This means that communication of the Twitter has undergone all these processes that I am describing in the paragraph above.

Ong further adds that: "At the same time, with telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the area of "secondary orality". This new orality has striking resemblances to the old its participatory mystique, its fostering of communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well. Secondary orality is both remarkable like and remarkably unlike primary orality . Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense [ala- Twitter], for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture - McLuhan's 'global village'. Moreover, before writing, oral folk were group-minded self-consciously and programmatically. The individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitive. Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because have had little occasion to turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward. In a like vein, where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing. We plan our happenings carefully to be sure they are thoroughly spontaneous." And Ong sums up thus: "The contrast between oratory in the past and in today's world well highlights to the contrast between primary and secondary orality. Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a large public than was ever possible before modern electronic development. Thus in a sense orality has come into its own more than ever before. But it is not the old orality.. The old-style oratory coming from primary orality is gone forever. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory talk was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots. Others perhaps hear more oratory, or at least more talk, from a major public figures than people commonly heard a century ago. But what they hear will give them very little idea of the old oratory reaching back from pre-electronic times through two millennia and far beyond, or of the oral lifestyle and oral thought structures out of which such oratory grew." We are in the instant cyber surfing/pop-ups and real-time streaming modals embedded within the Web which brings real time to micro-seconds of feed and a Datasphere akin to the Primodial Soup that had preceded the Big Bang and is now Human communication reality and is appearing to close-in on the speed of light/life in its technique blitzing man's conscious into the Dark Matter that is the Tweeterverse. How did this site of the Twitter evolved? In a short excerpt, Lisa Loves Linguistics, offers us a peek of this phenomen in their article:

Twitterverse, Twittizen and Twitterazzi

IIn 2006, the social network Twitter gained world-wide popularity. This so-called 'micorblogging' service enables its users to steadily send and receive messages named tweets. Consequently users can be said to be depicted as birds (although they are not directly called birds) that twitter: the conceptual metaphors (according to a Lakoff & Johnson-model) could be formed as USERS ARE BIRDS and MESSAGING IS TWITTERING.. Moreover, a little bird is part of the Twitter logo. This is one zoomorphic metaphor that developed in the last few years and refers to computer users and is evidently part of the common language vocabulary. In fact, it is highly productive and it seems there is virtually no limit to new creations:

• twitterverse = twitter+(uni)verse. "The cyberspace area of twitter. This naturally extends beyond twitter.com to anywhere you can twitter, which includes cell phones." (UD) This metaphorically motivated compound perfectly fits into our conceptualization of the INTERNET IS SPACE, e.g., cyberspace, MySpace or Open (Richard, 2004: 204)
• Cyberspace refers to "the totality of the world's networked computers, which form a huge virtual space" (FDC). Via a browser suers can explore the virtually infinite vastness of cyberspace. Furthermore, seen while browsing through Guardian's Website, the development of the twitterverse is compared to the Big Bang Theory and even a graphic was created that is said to be based on The Independent's classic "How the Universe began" However, at first sight it is strikingly reminded me of a celestial map which as well perfectly fit the THE INTERNET IS SPACE and the TWITTER IS A UNIVERSE metaphors.
• twittizen + twitt(er) + (cit)izen: "citizen of the twitterspace, someone who resides in the cyberspace area of the twitter. Someone who twitters." (UD) In analogy to the compound netizen, this creation reveals that we conceive of the Internet A city or community (Richard 2004) where we sort of live. We participate in communities, have and make friends, we chat and shop etc., etc. Clearly our conceptualization of the Internet as a city, i.e., as a virtual reality, is the basis of such highly creative compounds.
• Finally, twitterazzi + twittter-(papa)razzi us a certain kind of twittizen who "having a celebrity or pseudo-celebrity on sight, immediately snap a picture of said famous person and tweets about it." (UD) This compound shows that real life social structures are transferred to the Internet, twitterazzi are somehow online paparazzi (Provided by Lisa Loves Linguistics)
• Then we have these other words: "Tweeple"- People who use twitter.com-twitter speak for people; tweeterholic a person who is addicted to the tweeter; twat is an acronym for "the War Against Terrorism"; a user-created conjunction from Tweeter and Peeps, usually referring to the "Followers" of the person using the word.
• Meme is the fundamental unit of information, analogous to the gene in in emerging evolutionary theory of culture, or, a pervasive thought pattern that replicates itself via cultural means; a parasitic code, a virus of the mind especially contagious to children the impressionable; etymology: meme: derived fro Greek mimema, 'something imitated; Santa Claus is a more persistent meme than weasel frosting.
• Memes (rhymes with dreams) are similar to a computer virus, in the way they spread quickly over a network, or group of computers. The difference is that they are a sort of virus of the human mind. An idea, or thought that spread quickly, or one that occupies your thoughts that is tough to remove.
• Memoroid is a concentration of memory and hemorrhoid. Bad memories as in memories that are a pain in the a**. (Provided by Urban Dictionary)

The connection of the Twitter and the Twitterverse to the Expanding universe it is because as it is embedded with the Web, it facilitates for streaming Data to be amplified and disseminate into the farthest expanding reaches of the Internet: it is also an extension of ourselves same as the nervous system extends itself inside our bodies. It is at this juncture that we now look at the origins of these memes and what role do they play in our communal Twitter communication.

Origins of Memes and Zines

In order for us to understand and acknowledge how the new Twitter verbiage and jargon came into existence, we have to trace the origins of Zines and Memes. This historical background is to give the reader the sense and knowledge of the origins of the communication styles, facilitated by the Cyber Primordial Soup/Matter/ or Streams. In this case, we will refer to Douglas Rushkoff's rendition of this history, and he goes forth and informs us thus:

Using the same basic formula as Eclipse Enterprises, tens of thousands of small groups and individuals gather up their favorite memes an publish low-circulation magazines called "zines." Zines began as newsletters for science fiction fans in the late fifties. A particularly avid fan would type up ten or so carbon copies of his thoughts about a new book or film and then mail them to his friends who would respond by mail and then see their own comments in the next "issue." Mark Frauenfelder the editor of 'boing boing' is keenly aware o the place of zines in the media and meme pools: "Network television, national magazines, and book publishers in the overground media rely upon advertising sales incomes or public funding and as a result must appeal to a large audience to ensure their survival. To guarantee the continuing support of a large segment of a population, these external carriers must contain memes that are consistent with the ideosphere, or memetic, ecology of that group. Overground media reacts allergically to mutant memes, usually by destroying the external carrier by burning it or banning it or inciting the meme police to incarcerate the human propagator and "hir" [a meme-word meaning his or her] dangerously contagious to the nervous system.While Mark is not quite ready to acknowledge the fact that the overground media's "allergic reaction" to certain memes often contributes to their spread, he does recognize the important relationship between memes and their carrier. Each meme, especially a new or "mutant" meme, must find a carrier-a viral shell-capable of delivering it to ready individuals, even if they are in the minority. The mass media is understandably unwilling to provide passage for memes that will be unpopular with their audiences. They are in business.

Zines on the other hand, coming out of science fiction, have a history of considering and promoting cutting edge ideas. Unlike commercial magazines, zines have always been produced and funded out of a passion for an individual's ideas and a desire to print and reiterate the feedback of the audience. Zine shave no obligation to please everyone." this more or less gives one a better picture as to why the Twitter functions as it does today. The origins of zines and memes were the early inter-intractive means of social media using magazines and other alternative media and mediums. The Twitter is somehow their modern counterpart using the World Wide Web to reach to farthest part of its audience even in unknown places,since the cell phone provide for the Twitter access as part of their configuration. They also have characteristics as described above on memes or zines above,and are the same as the decentralized and decontextualized context and content that is the memes and zines that are swirling in the twitter feeds and streams

"People who read and produce zines are self-consciously interested in media viruses. Like Mark, they see the world of zines as a "Primordial Soup" or genetic pool. This is where social evolution takes place. To take part in zines is to participate in the memetic engineering of our future. The mainstream media is likened to the dinosaur, an evolutionary dead end, while wild mutation, erotica, and experimentation are taking place in the zine ocean.[Social Media are Primordial Soups and Web Stream that enable and facilitate for communal inter/intra-action. Zines are experienced by their creators and readers as an orgiastic frenzy of memes. They are the conceptual equivalent of free, unprotected sex. Only in this case, unexpected pregnancies and transmission of viruses are desired results." (Rushkoff) I might as well could have been talking about the Twitter, the Twitterverse and its present-day audience who are sending our unprotected and uncensored [which create a psychedelic mindset, churned by computer gizmos allowing feeds and streams to pour down from it through the Internet/Web. Whatever one tweets out into the cybersphere and mixing it with the present-day Datapool that is contained in and into the World Wide Web, help to extend human communication and human beings and Self. This is akin to the explosion of the Universe as it was created and is now hurtling into the Spaces' Dark Energy or Matter and lighting it up into forever: So, that is how the Twitter works like today as we engage in its socializing and dissemination thereof-along with its spreading capabilities and abilities into the Web Glut and Space, with humanity in Tow.

Rushkoff concludes thus: "Zines are an opportunity for readers to select the wool they wish to pull over their their own eyes. Rather than blinding them to reality, the zines present alternative realities to the ones that mainstream media foists upon them the rest of the day. Zine readers do not see themselves as ostriches hiding from reality; they are independent thinkers, disconnecting from the particularly mind-numbing mainstream media deluge that has replaced reality." Sounds like the audiences who are prowling and streaming down the Twitterverse mixing, collecting, sharing, following, Retweeting and propagating all zines and memes that are the stock in trade and communications ecology of Twitterville in the 21st century.

The Twitter Now, Today and Future

What the Twitterers are able to accomplish when they engage in their acts of communicating with each other, is that, "In their combination of the characteristics of oral and written communication, it is possible to argue that social media present a new form of persuasion. Social media are both particular and universal, allowing for direct, timely interactions just as writing preserves communication. Social media are both specifically persuasive, in that they deal with an immediate audience, and also susceptible to the logical claims of the universal, rational audience. Social media also erase the distinctions between audiences with readers, again mixing the particular with the universal. Finally,social media are both performative and propositional, combining the features of oral performance with the performance of textual output and the seeming solidity that this permanence lends to communication. Social networking has greatly expanded the opportunity of people to connect with family, friends and acquaintances. The general nature of sites like Facebook and Twitter makes conversations about television programs more likely without joining a particular discussion group. social networking is thus more like the water cooler than an online discussion board." (Hsia, 2010)

Now that we have a better picture of how the Twitter function(although it may not be all that is there to it), we nonetheless will take a look at some theoretical postulations that attempt to give us another angle to this net work. Physicist Ernest Hutten writes: "...the behavior of an organized system, the action of an organism, or human activity cannot be explained in terms of causal energy transmission alone ... information rather than causality describes processes in, or between organized systems. The most general model of a natural process on which scientific explanation may be based is no longer the movement of a particle under the action of a force, but the storage (or organization) and the transmission of information within a system. This is the genetic model." The new departure made by modern information theory was that it broke way from classical ideas about communication. It abandoned determinism, and with it simplicity. Information theory did not regard a message as a separate, independent object, but as part of an organized system, related to the other parts, even if those existed as possibilities. " As I have been saying, these theories predate the Twitter, but one may as well be describing the operational techniques of the modern-day Twitter.

Let's Put This Into Perspective

In this part of the Hub we will utilize the musings and counsels of Media Ecologist Neil Postman extensively regarding the effects and affects of technological change, theory and evolution.

"In America," Postman writes, "Orwell's prophesies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. ...As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future. ...An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan future. I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. but it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is an ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years."

Postman adds: "..To be unaware that technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological change in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without the usual TV programming diet. There is a certain poignancy in this, since there are no people who more frequently and enthusiastically use such phrases as "the information age," "the information explosion," and "the information society." We are apparently advanced to the point where we have grasped the idea that a change in forms, volume, speed and context of information means something, but we have not gotten any further."

Go Figure... Got To Figure

What is information? Or more precisely, what are information" What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it it mean to say that there is too much information? How could one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to "piety," "patriotism," to "privacy"? Does television give new meaning to "judgement" or to "understanding"? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper's "public" different from television's "public? [Are both audiences of these mediums different from the "audiences " of the emerging and converging media"?- my two cents] How do the different information forms [mentioned in this paragraph] dictate the type of content that is expressed? (Postman)

Postman process to further inform us thus: "For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important to those who ask the questions and arrive at my answers or McLuhan''s (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the question is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell. To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology. I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means that they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology-that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data-will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved. In any case, the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved. There are only two answers that come to mind, one of which is nonsense, and can be dismissed almost at none; the other is desperate but it is still all we have."

These are the questions and suggestion above posed by Postman, of which he ends up by counseling us: "What I suggest here as a solution in what Aldous Huxley suggested as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H,G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics the political and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in the "Brave New World" was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking." If one thinks about it, this is what is happening to the present-day Technological Society- most people are now nearly technologically dependent on gadgets and their techniques that are submerged and embedded therein.

The Twitter is an Extension of Us and Through Media

McLuhan's vision of the role of technology in these questions is that it subtly shapes the "environment in which events occur'. Additionally, we are different beings by virtue of the way in which technologies are no mere-add-ons to ourselves. McLuhan believed that culture is affected by technology via the impact on social structures but also by the ways in which it changes us in a more personal fashion.. He believed that "sense ratios or patterns of perception" are altered by technologies. According to McLuhan's theory, technologies alter the manner in which we habitually process information, incline us ore toward some learning styles than other (depending on the technology). Technologies can affect our information processing on other ways as well. The role of memory and inferential abilities in an oral culture, for instance, are quite different than in our culture. In our culture, you 'know' poetry when you read it and have absorbed the atmospheres and can infer something about political, social, and literary context of the work. Tests at university do not require students to show how well they have memorized the poems. In an oral culture, however, your knowledge of poetry would very much be a matter of how much you could recite. The emphasis in knowledge acquisition tends to be much more literal and the capacity to memorize large amounts of material is essential. These differences between these cultures are a direct result of different technologies (McLuhan)

The moulding influence of technology on culture, then, is profound according to McLuhan. It certainly needn't offer a complete explanation to any question we ask, but is far more important a factor than we have commonly understand. Technology may not 'determine' culture in many ways (what, of value, is done with it, for instance) but by its's nature and influence on people, technology will "shape and control the scale and form of human association and action. In his book, "Understanding The Media' McLuhan writes: The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name.... Whether the light is being used for brain surgery of night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the "content" o the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that "the medium is the message" because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. the content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association"

Postman in one Chapter of his wrote, "The Improbable World" suggests that the principal Key to technopoly's assault. [In the Age of Technopoly, technology is not merely the dominant factor within culture; rather, technology seeks to redefine our culture (and reality)]. Electric technologies are the extensions of our nervous system. With the arrival of electronic technology. man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. When information moves at the speed of signals in the central nervous system, man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness. t is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single unified field of experience." Post,an succinctly surmised my postulation of us being extended by the Twitter in his own way, of which I concur

The Culture of the Twitter

Cross further adds: "Everything is changing!" a startled Today Show news anchor blurted out, blinking into the camera as she finished reading the morning headlines. It's true, nothing's going to be the same. A Tsunami of electronic media has overtaken us on the Internet, transforming everything in its path. It's a revolution, and no one quite knows where we are headed. Way back in the 29th century, media guru Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic technology was going to change the world, turning it into a village and sending people back to their tribes. It's already happened. In the 21st century of the blog, Twitter, and social media networks, we are already living in a global village online, sorting ourselves out into tribes of opinion, lifestyle and ideology. If how people communicate determines how they think, live, and behave, as McLuhan said, we are well on our way to cataclysmic changes in those ways of thinking, , living and behaving. It feels as if the whole world is on the cusp of monumental change, at "an unchartered frontier," as New York Times columnist Frank Rich characterized it. Maybe the www web address stand for wild, wild, web [or, to add my two cents, world, wild, web]. Blogs, Twitter, and social media networks on the World Wide Web have opened up the conversation and leveled the playing field for ordinary people to express themselves without the usual media and information gatekeepers. Bloggers of every description and ideological stripe put out news bulletin and op-eds on a relentless hourly basis, covering everything from current events to the latest news and stories, talk, gossip, chats, monologues and so forth." (Cross)

In Bloggerati, Twitterati, Cross writes the following excerpt and they say: "Let's go back to Marshall McLuhan for a minute: "Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world. The stirrup and the wheel created unique environment of enormous scope. ...Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected environment-it created the PUBLIC." Print"," as McLuhan noted, "transformed society from an auditory/oral culture to a visual culture.," altering the ratio among our sense. Now, "in our time, the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel [and print] to the technology of electric circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. What would he say about the Internet and Twitter? Certainly these offer a totally "new human environment," one that we ourselves aren't even able to categorize yet. We certainly mine McLuhan 's mantra. "The Medium Is The Message," for clues, maybe even reversing it, in the case of the Twitter, to "The Message Is The Medium," where the high volume of social connectivity and interactive messaging has created a brand-new cultural matrix for the exchange of ideas. As a constant stream of real time information (and, maybe, information overload). Twitter has meant an enormous upswing in up-to-the minute communication among the global population. The "alchemy of the Web," as one social observer calls it, is giving a mass audience access to culture and engineering social transformation on a larger scale than ever before. But critics of Twitter point to the predominance of the hive mind in such social media, the kind of 'groupthink' that submerges independent thinking in favor of conformity to the group, the collective. New York Times columnist David Carr calls this "the throbbing networked intelligence." Others call it dangerous and dumb. People may fear embarrassment of being thought stupid because on Twitter they are performing publicly and in a group. They tend to conform even when they are showing off. Twitter doesn't squelch clever or obscene remarks, but it does exert social pressure and foster an "ambient awareness," as technology guru Clive Thompson calls it."(Cross)

Streams from the Twitter-Crypticverse

Reuters reports that, "Twitter is much more than a social network and has no time to waste worrying about newcomers like Google+ as it becomes more important as an information service an builds it advertising business," co-founder Jack Dorsey said on sunday. We have a lot to concern ourselves with, just building Twitter," Dorsey said when asked at a technology conference wether he was worried that Google's won fledgling network would come after Twitter. "Social is just one part of what we do. We think of it as an information utility," he said, describing Twitter as a personal new service as much as a social network. "You don't have to tweet at ll," he told the DLD conference in the German city of Munich. "The biggest value is finding out what's happening in your world in real time." Twitter, which lets people send send 140-character messages, or tweets, to groups of followers, has more than 100 million active users. Investors are eagerly awaiting a market float that could value the company at around $8 billion."

Reuters continues to inform us that, "Skeptics contend that the site has not yet proved it can make money. But Dorsey, who is the company's executive chairman, said advertisers were proving willing to pay to promote their tweets, accounts and trends. "Our Business model has been in development for quite some time, and it works," he said. Twitter is expected to have made about 140 million in revenue last year, according to an estimate by industry research firm eMarketer. Dorsey said Twitter was building a team in Germany, where privacy concerns run high and engagement with Twitter has been relatively low. He added that the company was always open to making acquisitions to acquire talent int wanted. Dorsey is also the founder and chief executive of fast-growing mobile payments start-p Square, which he said he wanted to expand internationally this year. "We would love to com to Europe, and we're going to work very, very hard this year to bring it outside the United States," he said. "We're looking at China. We're looking all over Asia."

In another article written in the The Next Web Conference 2012 this is what they reported: "Twitter has taken measures to be able to block specific content on a country-by-country basis, the company announced in a blog post. Its title, 'The Tweets Still Must Flow', is a reference to the famous post Twitter published last year on civil liberties. Unlike 'Tweets Must Flow,' which was co-written by Biz Stone himself, this year's post is not signed. This is not the only difference between the two messages, and today's title is quite misleading. In practice, what Twitter is saying is that there are some circumstances under which blocking certain tweets in a specific country is acceptable - sometimes for legal reasons. The micro-blogging platforms gives a specific example, "[Sometime countries,] for historical reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content." Twitter seems willing to abide to this kind of local restrictions, but doesn't want to block litigious tweets worldwide. As a result, it decided to give itself "the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world," the blog post details."

Anticipating criticism, Twitter announces that it built a way "to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld and why". This includes a partnership with the online project "Chilling Effects" to dictate a "page" to these notices. While Twitter's openness on this topic is laudable, this announcement is still worrisome. What kind of requests will the startup obey? While restrictions on neo-Nazi content are quite consensual, the same may go for copyright lawsuits. pursuits against 'Wikileaks' or tentatives to silence the opposition in authoritarian regimes. Sure, the company makes it clear there are requests it won't accept, and it's interesting to note that it's prepared to the idea that it ay have to give up entirely on certain countries - unfortunately left unnamed: "As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. some differ so much from our own ideas that we will not be able to exist there." Yet, the wording Twitter leaves space for concern p "to attempt" and "to try" don't fully qualify as promises. Says Twitter: "We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can't. If and when we are require to withhold a Tweet i a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld." In other words, civil rights activists may want to add http://chillingeffects.org/twitter to their bookmarks - chances are you'll hear about it again in the near future." (Sources: IMAGE CREDIT)

"Twitter Isn't Censoring You. Your Government Is"

We learn further that, "It's barely been a day since Twitter made the announcement that going forward, tweets could be censored based on the local laws that govern a user's location, and the rumor mill is hard at work trying to figure out the reasons behind the decision.At the same time, many Twitter users are calling for a Twitter Blackout on January 28, vowing to keep twitter quiet tomorrow." This never took place, and was surprised as a newbie and regular on the Twitter, when trying to play a song by Fela on YoTube, was met with a blockade that informed me that I would not be able to access that song due to the new Twitter Censor rules, which seem to be in effect as of writing of this Hub. Nancy Messieh has written the article I am about the government the censors the informative content on the Twitter by writing: "At the same time, many Twitter users are calling for a Twitter Blackout. Taking a look at the hashtag #Twitter Censored, a lot of fingers were very quick to point straight at the 'recent investment' by Saudi Prince, Alwaleed bin Talal, without considering the fact that his stake in the company is a mere 3%. alex Macgillivary, the general counsel of Twitter, has also confirmed to Boing Boing that the move has nothing to do with investments that Twitter has received. While up until now, Twitter is said to have only blocked content that violates copyright laws, the change expands to include tweets that violate the laws of any given country, provided that they are asked to remove the offending tweets. One possible reason is that Twitter has been consistently targeted by governments for allowing what is considered "illegal" content to be shared via the site, Israel "Shurat DaDin threatened to sue" the microblogging site if it didn't boot accounts with ties to Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Twitter has also seen increasing pressure from Us politicians, with Congressman Lieberman decrying the fact that the Taliban has a very vocal Twitter presence. Twitter obviously used carefully selected words to convey the charges - at the end of the day blocking tweets can't be defined in any terms other than censorship.But it is a half-hearted form of censorship that seems to appease the lawmakers but has no real direct effect on the user [a fact I do not not agree with at all- my addition]. Much has been made of the use of social media in the Middle Eastern uprisings, particularly in egypt. In 2011, Twitter proved to one of the essential tools used to broadcast news from Egypt to the world, while a year before that, Cairo-base activists used Twitter to coordinate protests and warn each other of security presence around the city. Twitter provides one of the easiest mobile methods to disseminate information online today. While it may be understandable to withhold racist, hateful and threatening content, Twitter's definition is all-encompassing and has the potential to take down perfectly acceptable content. following the uprising in Egypt, the government passed a law criminalizing protests. What if a law was were passed to criminalize online criticism of authorities? It's no stretch of the imagination, not when bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned for exercising their freedom of speech. In that case, the government in question could tell Twitter what is considered acceptable content. So, does this mean that the Twitter has given governments complete power to control what their citizens see on Twitter?" In a sort of way twitter has given up by agreeing to censor some countries and so-called undesirable tweets. By agreeing to the censorship of what is unacceptable, we the users are stymied and corralled into a corner of accepting it because it will not affect the users of Twitter. Well, as i have noted above, I have already come across such censorship with the music of Fela Kuti. Anyway, this issue will be revisited after in has been implemented for some years, or sooner.

Twitter The Streaming Media Data

Messieh wraps it all for us in this way: "It's very easy to criticize Twitter for this move, but the fact remains that in one day, it provided users with the news that content could be censored by location, while also giving them a simple method, one-click away, to make sure that the tweets do flow, regardless of location. The backlash has been harsh, and Twitter has been accused of committing social suicide, assuming that an algorithm would be taking car of the extremely sensitive task of censoring content. In it's announcement however, Twitter points out: "...if we receive a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity, it may be necessary to reactively withhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time." Twitter is not placing an automated censorship system in place, but rather will only comply with what it sees are valid requests. Twitter has actually found something of a compromise. With the use of a technicality, Twitter is able to safeguard the company legally, comply with governmental requests, and still make the content available to users with the workaround. The alternative would be to see Twitter blocked entirely in countries which consider its content to be a violation of the local laws. If the finger should be pointed at anyone, it isn't Twitter, but rather the lawmakers that make it possible to censor content in the first place. Twitter is viewing a hyperventilation of sorts, going to the point of calling for a Twitter boycott for one day, but as Jillian York points out, the announcement is not a signifiant change to Twitter's existing policies. The current attack on Twitter is no different from the common, but misguided, accusations that are often heard, that Twitter censors certain hashtags from making it into its Trending Topics, when in fact that is an entirely algorithm-based system, driven mainly by news outlets, and represent "topics that immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while on daily basis."

Some Digital-Age Media Outlets Driving the Twitter

We just take a brief look at mainstream media how they dominate the Twitter with trending topics. Fast Company informs us that, "Forget Ashton Kutcher and Lady gaga. On Twitter, mainstream media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, and BBC dominate trending topics. According to a new report by HP, trending topics are not determined by how many followers a user has of how prolific a tweeter that user is. After studying a sample of 16.32 million tweets during the Fall of 2010, researchers discovered that 22 users were the source of most trending topic retweets. (Roughly 31% of tweets about a trending topic are retweets..) Of these 22 influentials, 72% were Twitter accounts run by traditional news organizations, including Reuters and the Washington Post, but other digital-age media outlets such as the Huffington Post were also featured on the top trenders list. (while Lady Gaga didn't make the top rankings, what appears to be some knock-off Twitter feed run by "Lady Gonga" did. We snooped around to learn more about @LadyGonga and @vovo-panico." {but as an author myself, I found these sites devoid of information dissemination and hard to come by, an this makes me wonder as to whether this was a good example on the part of the author I am citing above- and it is hard to read because it has bee written in Portuguese- my addition]

"However, the report found that social media is not a replacement for new information" [this sounds odd, but will discuss it in the conclusion as to whether my own experience was that I found the Twitter to be a sort of replacement of the way the users imbibe and disseminate thee links found in the Twitter regard that as being news information, or an extension thereof]. "Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases," said Bernado Huberman, HP senior fellow director of HP Labs' Social Computing Research Group. This is especially true in the wake of the Egyptian unrest, when Twitter hashtags (#Mubarak, etc.) for the protests were constantly trending on Twitter, but filtering users to mainstream media outlets for the most breaking news. Appropriate for the 140-character format, Twitter trending topics disappear almost as fast as they come, suggesting users are hungry for more news. On average, according to HP's report, 40 minutes is the longest time a topic will stay at the top of Twitter's trends. Then how do you account for #JustinBieber?" (FastCompany, 2010).The Twitter is a new medium establishing new ways of communicating for its 'community' of users in the speed of light. It is a medium that is expanding and extending itself into the Primordial streaming so extending ourselves into new ways and spreadeagled throughout the World Wide Web, as is our nervous system inside our bodies, with all sorts of memes, zines, mimezines...

The Twitter and Twitterverse Experiences

As a writer an researcher, I do not necessarily cop out and say that the Twitter is good or bad, but concur with Post man that we need to understand How and Why the medium has made us depended on it, and what will happen if another new one comes out and bests the Twitter? I also believe that our media, data and the Twitter are in constant change because they do not satisfy us and are not always perfectly complete in their manifestation for our applications, but evolve as techniques and technologies evolve. This Hub will be constantly added-to and edited as the changes in the medium of the Twitter changes, or a new one upstages the present mode of human inter/intra communication with the converging and emerging new gizmos and technologies.. For now, I am going to be surfing the Tweeterverse streaming, reading incoming tweets, Following interesting posts, re-tweeting, adding my two cents on my Twitter space, and as of now, I am receiving about 3-4 thousand tweets a day, if that is not a lot of information of a diverse nature, I do not know what is... Makes me wonder that those with millions of followers, how do they keep up... well this streaming datasphere is also affecting our consciousness in many ways, and that will be my rejoinder to this article next time around...

One more thing... In the response box I was answering to Rehana Stormme that I needed to work some more on this hub, sort of polish it, which I will do in the very near future. But what I left out was what are the actual effects and affects of Twittering on its users. Rehana in response to the length of the article, began by saying that she was on Twitter, and in the end cancelled her account because, as she stated, "she was becoming addicted, After a few months of tweeting and after amassing quite a number of Followers, I started feeling tis condescending need to post about every menial thing I was doing...from 'going to get something' to when is it going to stop raining?'. Trust me, it was that bad, I now have a new account where I post Hub Related info and the like". This Hub is very long and involved, but, to her credit, she recognized the debilitating effects of being constantly immersed and embedded in the Twitterverse. In this Hub, as I will develop it further, I aim to give a sense and scope of the Twitter and maybe this might help us approach it better and use it in a more and less debilitating way most of us find ourselves caught up with.

I Tweet and Retweet mostly news, interest stories, and everything I find of value and interest and hope that those I Retweet to, who are my followers, and not many are, will glean as to the information I Retweet and used it for whatever purpose the deem fit. In other wordes. The coming of electricity, the printing press along with automation, introduction of Radio, TV, Newspapers, Books and media ecology of that nature, altered and extended man in many way than we have investigated to date. I use the tweeter to disseminate information as to what I am doing, Internet Radio Production on live365.com/stations/djtot12 and Blogging on ixwa.hubpages.com/. Along with these tow, I supply some aphorisms, and take the role of a reporter by retweeting all I think is informational and user-friendly. Some people twit non-stop, and even complain about the lack of sleep they are not having; companies hawk their wares; sports news of all sorts is reported; then there are those who have a monologue with whomever chooses to read their stuff; there are all sorts of promotions for all sorts of things; then there are celebrities with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, while some follow nobody in particular, or a few they choose; The are the COccuppy tweets; there are radio stations; DJs, Musicians and their show and posts; Great Festivals all over the world, and so on and so on.

Twittering vacuum-sucks one's time involving reading, Twittering and Retweeting and so forth. The Hub above interrogates the Twitter as a phenomenon that is addictive and time consuming as to whence it originates and what is its modus operandi is in our lives. Rushkoff gives us the historical background and Walter Ong and other enlighten us as to the progression of the the emergence of writing, orality and text. Postman raises questions as to hat is it that we are dealing with, since he regards the computer or internet as overrated, and somehow decries the fact that our media prophets have not left us with much on how to deal with these new media and their attendant technological gizmos. My thrust is that we need to pay attention to the extending patterns of the Twitter, and know its obscure beginning in order to better understand its addictive patterns and effects to better be able to handle it with some knowledge of what it is all about and why it was developed, and how we are using it today, and what both these things mean or portend for and the future, Obviously the Twitter has added and changed the way we communicate orally and in any written format. It is the limiting design of how much we can write on it that conditions reading, attention span, and as I have added on the post reply above, reinforces the business model already established by TV and Radio with their 30 second spots and the cutting-in of commercials onto daily programming. The MEdia Ecologist have long been contending that technology will eventually overtake humans. Maybe the Twitter is a glimpse into that world-its beginnings. But the way it is engulfing communities using and expanding itself into what I call the Dark Matter of the Twitterverse Soup, and it disables us of the life we knew before its advent, and leaves feeling insecure about what it is doing to us, and yet we know so little about its origins and what that means to our contemporary societies. Ido not have answers of the 'do's' and 'dont's' of the way of the future cascading the Twitter, but I know for a fact that we need to know more about it than we have heretofore done

One can do well by checking this excerpt by the Pew Internet Research: "Three quarters of U.S. adults go online. A majority of U.S. households have broadband Internet Access. Eight in ten adults have a cell phone. Six in 10 adults go online wirelessly with a laptop or mobile device. Half of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phone, With each hurdle passed, from basic Internet access to broadcast to mobile, Pew Internet research shows that each one has a multiplying effect on peoples behavior, making them more likely to share and to contribute to online conversations. Pew Internet research also shows that people are using these technologies to connect with up-to-date health information and, more powerfully, with each other. The Internet enables patients and caregivers to connect with those who share the same health concerns, creating a peer-to-peer network that clinicians can learn from as well."

Pew Internet further informs us that: "Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, My Space or Linkedin. These Internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. Toughly two-thirds of social media suers say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they've lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies. Other factors play a much smaller role-14% of users say that connecting around a shared hobby or interest is a major reason they use Social Media. and 9% say that making new friends is equally important. Reading comments by public figures and finding potential romantic partners are cited as major factors by just 5% and 3% of social Media users, respectively. The results reported here are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted on April 26-May 22, 2011. 1,522 interviews were conducted by landline phone, and 755 interviews were conducted by cell phone. Interviews were conducted in both English and spanis. For results based on Social [Media] networking site users, the margin of error is +/-3 percentage points (n=1,016).

The Twitter and the Tweeterverse are altering our lives, perceptions and day-to-day functions that had been a normal order of business and lives. This Hub is about all that, and the effects and affects Twitter has on us and also extending us in ways old ways of communication were incapable of doing. If we used land phones, now we use cell phones and other gadgets embedded with our mobile devices steered by and through the Internet. It is this new way of communication that needs to be put into a proper perspective so that we, as human beings, understand what we are dealing with, so that we might somehow use it responsibly. This topic is still developing and will be looking at the latest effects and affects of the Twitter, the Tweeterverse and the experiences in engenders.

Factoid

A first-of-its-kind survey, conducted by Tweeminster and Portland Communications, of 500 of Africa's tweeters (1.5 million "geo-located" tweets) has been condensed into one inforgraphic. It may not be the most comprehensive picture - and looking at comments section in The Guardian online, there are those who take objection to some of the information is presented. Still, hopefully this will spur others to think more broadly about and delve more deeply into how social networking is being used around the world; especially as it relates to social good and social change. Some of the interesting insights the study puts forth: Africa's tweeters are young (60 percent are 20-29 years old); while the average age of tweeters around the world is 39 years old). Also, Twitter is an important source of information - 68 percent of those polled said that they use Twitter to monitor news.

Twitter is often thought of as a European and American Phenomenon. But how does Africa use the social networking tool" As stated above, Tweetminster and Portland have analyzed more than 11.5m geo located Tweets from the last three months of 2011. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, use of Twitter is dominated by Africa's richest country: South Africa sent twice as many Tweets (5,030,226) as the next most active (2,476,800). Nigeria (1,646,212,), Egypt (1,214,062) and Morocco (745,620) make up the remainder of the top five most active countries.