James Gleick's Blog, page 7

Twitter Postscript: Earthquake!

Sitting at one’s desk in New York, one feels a tremor. Dreaming? Naturally one turns to cyberspace.

The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting an earthquake just moments ago, but it’s in Virginia. That’s 300 miles from here—impossible. Or is it?

The real-time seismograph from the Lamont-Doherty observatory is not responding. That in itself seems like a sign.

Then there’s Twitter. Sure enough! Markos says it’s 5.8 in the DC area. Aaron Stewart-Ahn says he felt it in Brooklyn. Irfon-Kim Ahmad says he felt it in Toronto. Colson Whitehead is right in there:

Several of my followers respond to a query within minutes, including Ismet Berkan, in Turkish: “sen o kadar bilim kitabi yaz, sonra da bunu sor.” Andy Borowitz reassures his followers that Justin Bieber is unharmed. And Maria Popova sums up: “Yep. We’ve just had an earthquake. And tweets about it travel faster than seismic waves.”

 

Why Am I on Twitter?

I am not “on” Twitter—what a loathsome expression. Now and then I may be on time or on my way or on a roll or on the phone; I am fortunately not on crack or on the dole or on the rag or on the wagon. But I am not on Twitter (or Facebook or the Internet).

I do, however, use Twitter. Occasionally I dispatch tweets of my own, but mostly I just listen. I follow a small number of people. (Very small: less than .000001 percent of the people available to be followed. That’s an important fact about Twitter. No one can sample more than the minutest fraction; everyone is taking droplets of the ocean.)

Last night, for a few excited minutes, I was reminded of why. Something important was happening far away, and I was able to check in, not on the reality, not on the facts, but on my tiny chosen slice of the global consciousness.

Tweets are not facts; they are not news. They are not to be trusted:

The real news will come more slowly, from brave and talented reporters working for the few great news organizations still able to afford them—such as Kareem Fahim (in Tripoli yesterday) and David D. Kirkpatrick (in Zintan) for the New York Times. Yet, considering what passes for news on cable TV these days, it’s not totally silly to speak of getting one’s news from Twitter:

Some of the people I follow (my followees? my leaders?) are friends and acquaintances; some are just people I admire. At least two are imposters: one (Samuel Pepys) entirely faithful to the original; the other, not so much:

The last time I relied this much on my Twitter feed was when the Murdochs pere & fils were testifying before Parliament. On such occasions one feels connected to others who care. I feel like Stephen Fry (except I don’t care about the football):

In olden times I might have turned on the TV. Not now.

Others are watching so I don’t have to.

Andy Borowitz fires away at the pace of a Gatling gun.

But there are no bright lines between journalists and jokesters.

This is a participatory universe. History is made in real time. A surprising amount of feeling can be compressed into an epigraph of no more than 140 characters.

Not the end of the story, for sure. But now I can go to bed.

 

Touching History: Addendum

In a little essay in The Times (which you can read here or there) I muse about the differences between the artifacts of history—the tangible, venerable manuscripts and notebooks and other touchstones—and their new digital counterparts. I try to push back against what I see as a little bit of sentimentalizing.

But nothing I say—and nothing I’m pushing back against—is as eloquent as a comment almost thirty years ago, long before the digitization began, by the great historian and biographer Richard Holmes. So let me just quote it here. It’s from his classic book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.

The past does retain a physical presence for the biographer—in landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters or journals. Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot … It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal “virtue” to an inanimate object, gives it a fetichistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time….

And then Holmes adds this wise caveat:

But this physical presence is none the less extremely deceptive. The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing almost as fast as human skin.