Wil Wheaton’s love letter to twitter

I’m digging Wil Wheaton’s love letter to twitter.

If history takes nothing else away from Twitter, I hope it will be something like this: communication is incredibly powerful. Making it easy for people to communicate, to directly talk to each other can change the world. We saw it in Iran, we see it during natural disasters, and I’ve seen it directly in my own life, in ways that don’t even compare, but are still pretty damn profound for me, personally.

And that’s what this post is about today: it’s about how Twitter fundamentally changed my world, and how grateful I am for that.

One of the things I’ve done this year is withdraw a bit from traveling, and I was a bit nervous about pulling away from the rough community of fellow writers, editors, and publishing peeps that I’ve come to know over the years.

Since I work from home, and since I live in the boonies of Ohio, its hard to basically socially withdraw for three to four months at a time.

But thanks to twitter, there’s always this sort of cocktail lounge background bumping of thoughts and ideas and interaction that I associate with traveling to mix it up in person.

Yes, seeing people in person is really way cooler, but I feel radically less cut off from my tribe than I used to when long periods would go by.

Also, much to my surprise, I’ve started using Skype and iChat to video chat with friends. I know, the future was supposed to have video phones, then it totally didn’t, and people made fun of them, but now anyone with a new laptop and passably decent internet connection can video chat.

It seems awkward, at first, but being able to see someone’s face adds a whole multiplier affect to communications, and it really convinces my backbrain that I’ve just gotten to hang out with that person that day.

Which is a good thing…

Filed under the topic Journal on February 11th 2010 at 1:45 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.