Futurismic

I expect many of the writers in Futurismic’s readership are already using Twitter to communicate with colleagues and friends across the globe… but have you considered putting it to the more practical use of getting people to help you brainstorm your plot problems? PR maven Steve Rubel points to a friend of his, Jeff Kirvin, who has done exactly that.

Personally, I think I’d struggle to ask the hive-mind a question that specific about something I was writing; outsourcing some of the imaginative process would probably derail the pleasure and focus of creation for me, I think. Do you lot ask for help on sticky plots, or do you conquer the mountain alone?

And speaking of help with plot points, I got an email from one Helen Callaghan informing me that she’s hosting a guest blogger whom you might want to ask questions of:

Marcus Chown, popular science author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin [and cosmology consultant to New Scientist - Ed.] will be guest blogging on my site!

He’s agreed to answer science questions from SF writers, so the idea is, if you’ve got a plot issue or setpiece that’s bugging you, or you ever wondered what would happen if a certain scenario came true, here’s your chance to get an expert opinion.

The idea is that we can start asking questions now by posting them in the comments on the site, and the answers will be posted on the 11th.

Thanks, Helen; that gives you a few days, so pop over and leave your questions if you got ‘em.

Nobody expected Twitter to be as useful as it’s turned out to be. Maybe this will work, too. National Public Radio has a story about The Extraordinaires, which is not a 60s British spy show but a social-media enterprise that encourages brief bursts of volunteerism.

Through The Extraordinaries, you might be able to use your smart phone — while waiting in the dentist’s office or standing in the Dept. of Motor Vehicles line — to:

• translate a foreign-language document into English

• add identifying tags to photos and videos for a museum

• give advice to a college applicant

During your lunch break you could snap a picture of a pothole that needs patching and zap it to the proper authorities. You could report a dying elm to the parks-and-recreation department or spot a rare woodpecker for the Audubon Society.

“This is an organization that changes the paradigm,” says Jacob Colker, 26, co-founder of the San Francisco-based Extraordinaries. “We hope people might look differently at that ride on the bus and not just play video games.”

Skepticism is healthy, too, of course. I’m still on crowdsourcing 101, myself, but unintended consequences can sometimes be positive.

[What are you doing? by wharman]

We raised this subject in the wake of the Georgia revolution, but it’s worth bringing up again. In the light Twitter’s starring role in the current election protests in Iran, there’s much talk of the power of social media as a catalyst and enabler for social change, but as Jamais Cascio points out, the morality of a tool depends on the people wielding it… and it’s not hard to imagine it being put to much darker uses, much as other media have been before.

Not because I have any sympathy for Iran’s government, I should hasten to say, or because I see any threat coming from this particular use of Twitter. It scares me because of how close it aligns with something I noted in my talk at Mobile Monday in Amsterdam earlier this month, an observation that happened almost by accident.

In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide. The audience was understandably stunned by the question, and after a few seconds someone shouted, “No!” I could only hope that the anonymous reply was right, but I don’t think he was.

Certainly a point worth considering; no doubt there’ll be a backlash – against Twitter, or whatever the latest flavour-of-the-moment equivalent is at the time – once more people start asking the same questions as Cascio has. It should be a self-evident truth, but we need to remember that technology alone won’t make the world a better place; it’s up to us to use it in the right ways.

WIRED reports on what “may be a modern equivalent of Alexander Graham Bell’s ‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.’:

Early on the afternoon of April 1, Adam Wilson posted a message to Twitter. But instead of using his hands to type, the University of Wisconsin biomedical engineer used his brain.  “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET,” he thought.

The research, which could provide a new means of communication for people locked in their own skulls by paralysis or other problems, is built on the BCI2000, a software tool pioneered by Justin Williams, head of the University of Wisconsin’s Neural Interfaces lab, and Wadsworth Center neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk, which translates thought-induced changes in a scalp’s electrical fields to control an on-screen cursor.

Although it’s in wide use in labs, notes WIRED, “its communications applications have been largely restricted to messages appearing on a nearby screen. “

“A lot of these have been scientific exercises, geared to writing things out but not really doing anything with it,” said Williams. “We wanted to say, that’s not how a person would want to communicate, especially with the advent of online communications.”

Williams notes that emailing is relatively difficult and inefficient for someone using a brain-computer interface. Twitter, by contrast, “is very serendipitous. It handles all the things that we’ve been struggling to make easy for a patient to do. It puts messages where people can find them. Let the world know how you’re doing, what you’re thinking, and they’ll find you. And that’s perfect for these patients and their families.”

So brain-computer interfaces are already here for limited uses (Wilson and Williams will next install the program in the homes of 10 people already outfitted  with trial versions of the BCI2000). In the future, more advanced brain-computer interfaces could help people control prostheses, powered exoskeletons, humanoid robots…

Well, what would you do if you could control a computer with your thoughts?

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

[tags]brain, computers, disabled, Twitter[/tags]

Twitter has definitely made the transition from inexplicable geek tool to mass-media buzz phenomenon (as indicated by the plethora of recent posts about it, both here and elsewhere).

The rapidity of Twitter’s rise (and, arguably, its seeming innocuousness) has allowed it to get the jump on organisations unprepared for its power, speed and influence – as demonstrated by the #Amazonfail debacle over the easter weekend.

Jeremiah Tolbert takes a look at #amazonfail, and determines that Twitter is almost the ideal medium for that sort of emergent protest, as well as a warning to organisations big and small that they need to learn to respond to criticism on microblogging networks as quickly as possible:

In the information void that existed on the weekend, many intentions were invented to explain. Right-wingers had collaborated to manipulate the system via tags. Amazon had capitulated to right-wingers and dropped the titles. It was a programming error. A massive conspiracy of internet pranksters manufactured it so that they could feed on the outraged tears of twitter users. And so on.

Much like Nature abhors a vaccum, the internet ahbors an absence of information.

Amazon’s lack of immediate response allowed the controversy to build to unprecedented levels. Rarely have I seen the internet move in one angry direction so effectively. It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter. Email, texts, none of them had the perfect assembly of features and usability that Twitter does.

Much as we were discussing with respect to the Moldovan Twitter revolution, there’s no implicit morality in this system; it gets used to express the hopes, prejudices and fears of its users. Spiraltwist at grinding.be makes the point:

Forget the bot networks. Forget the viruses. All you need is a massive follower list (or enough people to cross pollinate their twitter streams with your message) and people clicking to take down or disrupt websites for a bit. Click. Click. Click.

There must be dozens of technothriller authors across the planet chewing their pencils in frustration at having been pipped to the post by reality on a particularly pertinent Zeitgest plot device…