The New CB Radio: "Come on back!"

Let's do a little futurology today, always a good exercise for SF/F/R writers.

Patric Michael pointed me to this YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w&feature=dir

It's a high-production-values animated satire about addiction to twitter.com and tweeting. The theme seems to be that the practice of tweeting is pointless.

The piece is worth seeing just for the production itself, not the message.

The message is populist but I think way off base. However, it's worth listening to carefully because it does express accurately and with an appropriate amount of tasteful humor what non-tweeters see tweeters doing.

This is a viewpoint I've seen expressed variously about golfers, runners, skiers, gamers, bird watchers, dogshow competitors, and hobbyists of all sorts. Tweeting is much cheaper than most social activities.

But frankly, because of the social barrier to social networking highlighted in this video, I am not at all sure twitter.com will survive this economic downturn. It was heavily funded at startup and is still striving to deal with that debt.

I've been on twitter.com (as http://www.twitter.com/JLichtenberg so you can follow me there easily once you set up a free account) for only a few months. I'm just beginning to discover some of the off-twitter.com tweeting tools that have built up around this communication device.

There are endless blogs and pages full of tutorials on how to social network, and I've read only a sparse few of those. Lately, there have been tutorials circulated for how to use twitter to advertise your wares -- any product you want to sell. Those tutorials are of interest to writers because we have books to hawk. People with something to sell see a market (word of mouth is the best advertising) and greed ignites the hearts and minds. The smoke from that inner fire of greed makes your tweets reek.

Veteran tweeters shun the commercial push, and other tutorials advise strictly against making your tweets about you and what you want or are offering. The advice is to make your tweets about other people, not yourself or your wares. Tweet about a well defined subject, and give real information -- that's the kernal of the advice I've seen. The key is to GIVE.

And when you give real value for your reader's time, you tend to get "retweeted" (which is like a good online review for a book - word spreads).

Here is an article on getting retweeted (seriously, people are studying twitter.com member behaviors this closely). The article gives this advice: typically, people want to pass your Tweet on for one of three reasons: they found it useful, funny, or informative

http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/social_networks/how_to_get_retweeted_advice_from_three_pr_pros_110370.asp
I've seen the exact same advice and admonitions in several articles. Apparently there is an audience on the web that thirsts for advice on how to relate to new people you've just met. Or maybe there are just a lot of people with nothing of their own to say who are repeating to you what you already know. This might be considered in the category of a useless waste of time.

However, I see something going on here that apparently a lot of people don't.

Place the micro-blog or tweet (a 140 character message useful because it will auto-shrink a long URL into a micro-URL -- a service available at some websites directly) against the background of the macro-trends of the world over the last few decades. (Good futurology starts in the past, you see.)

Blogs are the equivalent of the snailmail letters and letter-zines and APAzines (all SF fanines used to be non-fiction until Star Trek fanfic hit a voracious market). Fans used to exchange these longer more involved essays on the subject of the moment, the latest book, movie or TV show on paper, or (again with the advent of Star Trek fandom) by telephone.

Twitter and micro-blogs on social networks are the equivalent of the post cards we used to exchange. The phone calls tended to be midnight low rates, and last for hours apiece, so they were more like conversational blogs with lots of comments.

What you can fit on a post card, taken out of the context of the 'zine or round robin letters, is utterly meaningless. Yet for those to whom it is addressed, it holds great, deep, and consequential meaning.

Likewise microblogging -- any single message is meaningless. Taken in context of "who" this person is, what comments they've left on Yahoo News blogs, in their own blog, comments on other people's blogs -- in context, the microtweet "Had pizza for lunch" gains GREAT meaning (knowing this person is allergic to milk products but addicted to pizza).

The odd thing is, I never (ever) saw any tutorial on how to use letters and post cards, or even how to publish a paper 'zine. People just knew how to social network despite the week or more between sending and receiving. Even us nerds who were considered so socially undeveloped in those days hit the ground running once connected with someone who had something to say we wanted to hear! No tutorial necessary. Pure instinct. The instinct of a social creature finally finding another member of our own society -- people who read.

I recently saw an item that the post office is closing several more distribution plants and firing a huge percentage of the postal workers in layoffs and attrition. Nobody snails anything they can e anymore.

The snailmail fan network generation raised their children on Sesame Street. That show reduced attention spans. Children grew to adulthood without the ability to sit still and concentrate on one thing long enough to read a book. Parents used the fascinating TV screen as a baby sitter while they snail-mailed and many have lived to regret that.

In the 1970's the biggest topic in macro-trends was the information explosion and how would we ever deal with so much data. SF writers doing the futurology never got the results of the information explosion right.

Then AOL gave the average American online access with dialup. That business model collapsed as cable provided broadband. Now it's wireless everywhere. 3G networks. More information, faster eventually meant music, video and TV shows on your computer or cell phone.

Google emerged with an innovative algorithm to conquer a lot of that deluge of information. You can now find what you want when you want it. Spam exploded, forcing the development of closed and monitored associations which we now call social networks or Web 2.0.

LiveJournal started the blogosphere, I think -- though there were individual web-log keepers among the geek community long before that. The blogosphere exploded, expecially after Google bought blogspot.com and blogger.com, although it was huge before that.

Meanwhile, in the 1980's and 1990's, CB Radio grew prominent. CB has limited range and frequencies reserved. When TV goes digital, more frequencies will be available for emergency first responders, but we can't have better civil defense response because a couple million out of 310 million didn't get their coupons.

Many cars had to had CB radio to talk to cops, truckers, other motorists. I've had several, and found them a lifesaver when driving interstate, when I needed to ask for help. But mostly I just listened to what engaged and interested truckers. Marvelous research tool. That trend is gone now because we have cell phones and sat phones for safety driving interstate.

With the phones came text messaging your friends. Texting is a form of microblog -- you are limited to tiny snatches of text so small people invented shorthand to squeeze something sensible into the space. Now many have forgotten there is a thing called SPELLING, not to mention capitalization conventions.

Connect the dots I've mentioned, and maybe you'll see the pattern I see.

More and more communication tools, fast, accurate, easy to use, being placed into the hands of people who have nothing to communicate except the fact that they exist and think they should be paid attention to, counted.

Check out who blogs and what they talk about in what style on this survey page:
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

That's so similar to what drove the craze for the original CB Radio in cars, though Ham Radio operators are a different breed than the general public. The old fasioned Ham Radio operators were geekish techies and journalists who covered a world-girdling beat and kept each other informed of what was happening that the media was averse to covering. But they are a social network, too.

Occasionally, those socially driven Ham operators saved thousand of lives when mass communication went down during a disaster. They were bloggers! And today Twitter has been used exactly like that - to save lives in wildfire situations, and eventually I'm sure in earthquake and tsunami if they can keep the cell towers functioning. That is, when someone has something important to say, people pick it up and "re-tweet" it until everyone in the world knows it.

Why does twitter.com deserve the flak it gets in this animated indictment?

After all, the folks who behave in the insanely addicted fashion shown in the animation get quickly shunned on twitter (and in the old paper-based fandoms too). On twitter.com they stand out because they may be following more than a thousand people, but maybe 20 follow them. Twitter has recently instituted curbs to prevent that kind of abuse of the system, both by individuals and by salesmen and businesses.

Those individuals who can't "get it" as higlighted in the video, sign on and then never come back. So the two animation characters and their argument in this video is irrelevant to tweeters. Why do both these things happen to these kinds of people?

What is twitter.com , really about? And why did futurologists miss this potential since they were SF writers fully conversant with on-paper fandom? What are WE missing that would make a terrific novel? Movie?

The advertising and sign-in pages for most micro-blogs invite you to post something by posing you the question: What are you doing now?

And that's where the whole thing goes wrong. Many tutorials on how to use twitter advise against answering that question because it's the wrong question.

Way back when my mother was a kid, they taught things in grammar school like penmanship, ellocution, and how to write a personal letter (on paper, with a pen you dip into the ink.)

They still taught penmanship when I was in grammar school all the way to 7th grade. (I flunked.) I took to the typer the instant my Dad bought one when I was in 8th grade! But I had learned to compose the personal letter. Typing was easy.

The very first thing I typed on that typewriter was a letter to the editor of IF MAGAZINE lambasting them for the lousy artwork illustrating the stories -- they never got the image correct according to the text. I had an urgent and firey need to communicate this simple point - DRAW IT CORRECTLY. Given the high tech communications tool of the day, I did just what new tweeters do - expressed myself without even knowing the person I was yelling at, and not caring. I just had to get this message OUT. It was personal.

They published it and that changed my life. Years later, my first story was published in IF -- and had a grossly inaccurate illustration! It's as if illustrators can't read English. (Thank G-d, Patric Michael isn't one of those!)

Today, the best language courses and learning systems rely on what became known as the Ulpan system, invented by the Israelis when they had to take in more refugees than the total population of their country and somehow get them all able to speak, read and write a language in common.

The Ulpan system relies on a basic human need that is being fed by the microblogs like twitter.

The Ulpan relies on the ultimate, life-or-death, very primal (that's a word Blake Snyder uses a lot, and I'm using it in the sense he does -- as a fictional element that must be present in order to make a story happen) -- a primal human need illustrated by my need to write that first typed letter.

More primal than sex, a little less primal than the need to breathe air or to eat. But it's right in that level of primal. It is a survival necessity.

The very first thing a newborn does after taking a first breath is SCREAM.

It isn't "crying" in the sense of being driven by emotional pain.

It's more driven by physical shock. It's a scream. And that primal scream of the newborn is the first action taken by a human being. It's a reflex, clears the airways, and announces Need.

Newborns need to be cared for. They are nothing but need. Way before they have any awareness that "others" even exist, they communicate that need.

Those that don't cry, don't live.

Think about newborns abandoned in dumpsters -- that tiny little cry pierces the cold steel and sometimes rescue happens.

The CRY is uttered -- and something happens. The newborn doesn't have the brain cells to connect cause and effect at that point, but the CRY IS ANSWERED.

Way before we ever say anything on purpose to get a response, the first thing that ever happens (and this might not be true for other species out in the galaxy!) is we RECEIVE a response to something we don't even know we did.

NOTE THAT WORD RECEIVE -- it's crucial to some of the more esoteric and abtusely philosophical writer's block breakers I talk about. RECEIVE has vast mystical significance.

Receiving is simply that primal. Cry and receive. That's how we learn to communicate, and we learn it in that life-or-death circumstance and the NEED TO COMMUNICATE is engraved on every braincell with the warning SURVIVAL NECESSITY.

Using that innate need to communicate, the Ulpan method of language learning deprives the student of all other means of communication besides the language to be learned. It's often called the immersion method, but it's far more than that. The technique isn't so much the presence of the new language as the total absense of any and all other languages or methods of communication.

You don't learn by translating. You learn by acquisition (even if you're an adult). Nobody tells you what words mean. You have to figure it out.

The need to communicate is so primal that even adults end up thinking in the new language, even to the extent of forgetting how to speak their native language!

The need to communicate is that powerful.

The need to communicate can re-arrange your brain cells to use whatever channel is open. Any response that comes in will ignite the greed to communicate.

Now if you haven't watched that little animated video, watch it now with this need to communicate concept in mind. (and if you're an Alien Romance writer, watch carefully the communication gulf between these aliens from different planets in the video). Yes, even though they are both human from Earth and work in adjacent cubicles, the gulf between them is interstellar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN2HAroA12w&feature=dir

What the one man can't grasp is that the other's need to communicate is totally independent of content - of having something to say that is selected to be of interest to those you are talking to.

A baby's first cry isn't aimed AT someone, saying "HELP ME" -- there's not yet any sense of "me" in contrast to "you." Where there's no "you" there can't be any "me." It's just SCREAM.

Placing these communication tools such as twitter into the hands of people who have nothing to say and nobody to say it to is like attending a birth, clearing an airway, and listening to that first CRY.

It's a SCREAM. It has no content. It says OUCH. It says HELP but not HELP ME, for there is no "you" to be summoned. No awareness of the identity of "other" is in that scream.

It is a SCREAM FOR ATTENTION -- a continual, hour by hour all day whimper for attention, just like a baby's fretting and learning how to fret to get results as the twitter-ites are searching the web for tutorials on social networking.

Is that SCREAM contemptible?

Think about it a bit more. If we looked at all newborns as contemptible because they can't do anything but cry, whimper, and scream, how many of us would there be?

Do these neo-tweeters need to be held in contempt? Or do they need to be nurtured until they have something to communicate, someone to communicate it to, as well as the means to do so?

Recently, a number of domains have sprung up to index twitter.com's membership so people can find like-minded people -- people who have similar interests are being drawn into circles. They then discover they do have something to say that someone else wants to hear. Eavesdrop on them and you'll hear gibberish.

So, with the advent of mass-personal communication media, Earth is girdled with a tweet-o-sphere.

What do you suppose this might look like to the Aliens Who Watch?

Do all species throughout the galaxy go through this phase of infancy in communication?

In the 1950's and 1960's, Science Fiction glibly predicted that we were being watched and that Earth was embargoed because of our SCIENTIFIC infancy. We wouldn't be admitted to the galaxy civilization until we had conquered War and made our own space ships.

Well, in the 50's and 60's -- WWII was the big shame and blot on human conscience. And Science was leading the charge to a better life for all.

What's our problem today? We have space ships and a space station, and so much orbital junk there are accidents. But the aliens haven't invited us to the galaxy picnic yet.

We still have war, and it's brewing up to be bigger than WWII unless - unless what?

UNLESS WE CAN COMMUNICATE!!!

Nope.

We can communicate -- with a fury and a vengeance. Both combatant sides in the ideological war are using these communication tools, blogs, tweets, whatever, SCREAMING their messages. But they aren't all talking about the same thing at the same time. So (like overheard tweets) their messages are incomprehensible.

We aren't in two-way communication even at the level of scratchy, static-ridden CB Radio. (Have you seen TV "news" where the interviewees and the anchor all are shouting at once? What does that imply about their audience?)

As tweeters mature, and the blogosphere evolves, perhaps we will pass some galactic agency's test in communication skills and be allowed into kindergarten for new planets -- providing we can nurture the neo-tweeters to begin to inject content into their utterances.

At the moment, though, far too great a portion of our population has nothing to say. You can generally tell who they are by the number of meaningless words they interject into their utterances. The more rage they feel, the more driven to get your attention, the more meaningless expletives pepper their sentences, and the more their posts seem like primal screams rather than messages.

Maybe our urge to communicate, primal as it is, just isn't galactic class?

What can we do to attract "their" attention? What's the primal scream of a newborn civilization? What do we have to say that anyone "out there" would want to hear? Respond to?

Think again about how the social impact of the internet and the web were missed by SF futurologists, though they predicted A.I. robots which we almost have now. Think about the bemoaning of the information explosion and how it would be a destructive force because we had no means of taming it. Now think about Google Search, Web 2.0 and social network sites like facebook and myspace.

Futurologists are as overwhelmed by the implications of twitter and blogs as their predecessors were in 1960 by the information explosion and photocopiers in every library busting copyright to smitherines.

I got an email today mobilizing blog combat targeting the blog of a Florida newspaper about an issue local to New York but with national implications for air traffic controllers. That's also going on with the Yahoo news blogs -- huge organized groups of ordinary people are swarming into combat zones on the web.

What does the popularity of twitter.com mean for the future of world society?

Please drop a note on this blog to demonstrate that you have something to say, someone to say it to other than yourself, and know how to say it. Maybe someone "out there" will notice us inside this dumpster? Maybe that won't be such a good thing? Or maybe we'll learn to talk if someone comes to teach us?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com/