Communicating versus connecting. absolutely. Many are convinced they are connecting, of course they are not.

Psychologists would, I believe, have a field day with some some social networking spaces and the behaviours exhibited.

I cant see how twitter will survive as it is, imagine following and being followed by tens of thousands of people, how do you keep track of what ur “friends” are saying.

I asked a few ppl this and many said, “I filter out the ppl whose tweets i dont want to read”. i said “why follow them then”. silence….

I think you can create something there, amongst the noise, but it requires lots of time. trouble is their is an epidemic of attention deficit too. dont really go hand in hand do they.

One thing that has astonished me is when you do meet ppl in the real world. You’re trying to converse with them and they are on the phone, texting, twittering etc etc.

How can ppl connect like this either, and the answer is, you cant. I actually think if someone sold a product, that you could buy in your supermarket called “instant friends, no more need to try” they would probably go and buy it.

One thing though. One day, i hope to bump into you at an event, shake your hand and go grab a beer :-) and whilst we shoot the breeze I would like to think that neither of us will be inclined to check what’s happening elsewhere every 10 seconds or so.

take care

How do you actually know that @the_real_shaq is actually Shaq?

You have to have the real world validation of someone calling him up and confirming his identity. So these online connections need some kind of offline validation.

For those of us who are less famous, people generally assume that a profile in our name is the genuine person. But ultimately I think we do get validation of someone’s online identity through conversations/interactions that are referenced offline.

During the trip I was largely disconnected. Roaming telecom was simply too expensive to be in the digital skinner box all day – pushing the bar was more financial shock and a lot less snack. So, I met people, drank a vast quantities of tea, talked politics (ours and theirs) for hours on end, played with kids etc. It was great and I feel mentally refreshed like I haven’t in a long time.

I wasn’t completely disconnected though and I made judicious use of my bandwidth to post four or five tweets per day, post some pictures, and maybe a blog post every few days. The result was that quite a few people experienced at least a bit of the trip vicariously through me. I would wake up every morning to DM’s, emails, facebook comments, and SMS messages asking me about someone I had met, or to make some comment on an experience I had the day before. Twitter definitely made the biggest impact. I think people enjoyed following along and at the same time it really enriched my experience to remain connected to my friends in the states (both flesh and blood friends and twitter-only friends).

My problem with twitter is that its Skinner-box immediacy tends to draw me too much to that saccharine end of the communication continuum. My recent trip reminded me just how powerful and important deep, un-rushed, truly present human contact is.