Lately I was keeping it low with blogging. They say silence is golden. Yes, it is, but don't exaggerate with all that golden bling bling. Silence is good from time to time as it encourages observation. The observation is good before you draw any conclusions about surrounding world.
I followed the discussion about blogging vs. Twitter going on for a couple of weeks.The interesting about the whole discussion is the urge we have for making revolutions. We can't just use both blog and twitter as complimentary tools in communication. No, we desperately want to replace them. We strive for making revolution, for introducing new things and putting our fingerprints on them.
We are talking about visions, future, and ideas thinking in linear ways. Surely, the world is changing, the new things happen all the time, but they aren't linear. We tend to believe we moved from A to B, from Blogging to Twittering and then we expect we move from B to C - who knows maybe it could be the silence stadium.
The fact is that our life is a pulse. Pulse is not linear. It is like pendulum we go from A to B and return to A. It is like in the trivial saying: the history repeats itself. We always return to the same or similar places convinced that with every movement we have discovered something new, that we've changed reality. Yes, there are changes but they have rather evolutionary character - evolution fills the gaps where there is an opening.
The new social media and the new technologies aren't anything revolutionary new. They are just the result of technological development we have been experiencing though the last decades. The core behind social media isn't anything new. The social media, communities, tools whether they are old-fashioned (photo albums, phones, letters, neighbours gatherings in the backyard, etc.) or modern (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, etc) are grown up upon the same human need - need for being with other. The modern social media forms are just more powerful. The human needs are empowered as never before. The traditional photo album wasn't accessible to so many, as the photo album on Flickr.
Exchanging the old media or tools with the new ones will not generate a change. We should move away from linear thinking and begin to feel the endless pulse of human life. We need to learn to combine and cooperate. We need to navigate within complexity.
"Throughout the universe, then, order exists within disorder and disorder within order (...) Just as in the timeless image of yin and yang, we are dealing with complementaries that only look like polarities. Neither one is primary; both are absolutely necessary." (M. J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science)
Blogging and Twitter are just two different tools that are suppose to help us to communicate, transmit our meanings, build networks, find like-minded peers, etc. The complement each other. None of them is better than other. They just fulfill different needs for people in different states of mind. After all SMS didn't replaced telephone conversation.
Tags: blog, twitter, evolution, communication, pulse
