It's high time I posted something about Twitter. I have been twittering for just about half a year now, and the extent to which it has become a central part of my intellectual and professional existence is truly remarkable. So it bears commenting on, but I don't want to just talk about Twitter, but rather how Twitter fits into the larger messaging universe that we inhabit in 2009.

The most striking feature of my use of Twitter these days is the sheer amount of time it takes up in my day; if you had told me a few months ago that it would chew up this much of my productive time, I would have run, fast, in the opposite direction. Thing is, I think it's worth it. And so, like the Internet and the web and Wikipedia and blogs and such big things before it, Twitter is an example of a phenomenon which cannot be justified in terms outside itself. You couldn't predict or even describe the phenomenon beforehand. But once you see it in action, you begin to realize how important and valuable it really is.

Twitter really clicked for me when I saw it at conferences; the amplification of ones own experience via the real-time projections of dozens of other people has, I think, completely transformed the experience of being at a conference. O'Reilly today ran a nice post-analysis of Twitter use at WordCamp SF that gives nice topsight on what this looks like. My experience of Twitter at MiT6 this spring was of an emergent conference zeitgeist that became clearer and clearer as the backchannel unfolded. I don't think that extra layer of interpretation and sense-making could have come any other way.

Now at home, at my desk, the Twitterstream continues unabated. I am reading people at other conferences that I am not attending, as well as people twittering their day-to-day lives and the things crossing their desks. And, as the unfolding Iran election events have shown, we are party to global reverberations of local events elsewhere; not just the real-time streams, but the retweeting, collection, curation, and reflection of these messages, layer upon layer, in wider and wider circles of people.

Since I spend my time thinking about academic and cultural-industrial ideas, most of the people I follow (about a hundred and fifty) are directly feeding that thinking. Watching the Canadian book industry in the weeks leading up to and after BookCamp Toronto was an amazing experience. The day-to-day message streams were so rich, with so much valuable material being discussed, reported on, and released, in something approaching real time. It began to make my other information habit—reading blogs via RSS—start to look obsolete.

Which brings me to my larger point, which is how Twitter defines only a part of our larger message landscape—a message landscape which becomes more and more central to intellectual life today.

Quick quiz: how many of you have a love/hate relationship with your e-mail inbox? And how many of you have a plain-ol' hate relationship with your inbox? I am definitely in the latter camp. E-mail has become for me a chore; it is an enormous time- and energy-sink that I must contend with each and every day. Heaven forbid I let it go for a day, for it piles up even higher. At a university, as with most 'modern' institutions, e-mail has become the default mechanism for all official communication, delegation, reportage, and co-ordination. The only correspondence that ever arrives on paper anymore are the few things I receive each year telling me about my official, legal employment status. I tack them all on a bulletin board in my office, because they're *special*—they're slightly too numerous to actually frame, but they're rare enough to want to go on the wall.

Our excellent publishing librarian at SFU, Nina Smart, once noted that the great thing about RSS was that it got the things you actually want to read out of your inbox. Doing so has a moral/psychological effect that I'm sure most of you can relate to. The inbox is full of the things you have to do, have to read, have to respond to. Ignoring it for any amount of time has the character of delinquency or truancy. Your RSS (which seems to mean Google Reader for pretty much everyone I know) has a different feel. Letting it go for a few days feels more like missing TV shows; there's a feeling of regret, but not guilt.

What's become common to both the inbox and the RSS reader is the sense that they're piling up on you, and that if you don't get busy, it'll pile up more, and you'll lose. At BookCampTO this spring, Mitch Joel explained, "email is like Tetris for grown-ups. The blocks keep coming, and you do your best to catch them all and put them in the right places. But inevitably, they start coming too fast, and they pile up. And soon, it's game over." Wow. What a perfect analogy. RSS has the exact same character, only at this point, it still feels a bit more like a game.

So Twitter begins to do some of the work of RSS—keeping you alerted of new things to look at, to read, to pay attention to. It works remarkably well at this, and as such it really is a "micro-blogging" application. And so it follows that Twitter begins to have the same Tetris-like telos. At some point, the Tweets come so fast that you can't read them all (various people have suggested that the threshold is somewhere between 100 and 200 people). And so you begin to filter them somehow, either at the client end with the reader software, or at the source end, by unceremoniously unfollowing the over-prolific.

The sheer volume of all this messaging, what with Twitter, RSS, e-mail—let's throw Facebook in as well—and whatever else you may be mainlining, is astounding. What on earth did people do before these technologies? Wait... I'm old enough, let me see if I can cast my mind back... hrm... Hard to remember. What did we do? We certainly had full, busy lives; we felt important and well connected and stimulated. But by what? Books? It is very hard to look at the other side, and make any sense of it anymore—it's what Thomas Kuhn called "incommensurable." Effective organizations today rely on being message-oriented. And it makes working with non-message-oriented people more and more difficult.

There is at this point no going back, no backing out. The intellectual life in the 21st century is one populated by these message streams. In them we wade, and swim, and occasionally drown. The "virtual" sphere, which we all inhabit now, is located here, if anywhere. It's not cyberspace anymore, as Alex Soojung-Kim Pang points, out, it's pervasive. The message-oriented world (yes, there is a subtle Alan Kay reference there) is not an elsewhere to which we occasionally (or obsessively) go; it's here.

A year ago, I blogged about a dream that I'd had of a message-handling system of the future, one that would fold in email and RSS and Twitter and everything else and then present them in different kinds of streams and with different kinds of filters, depending on the underlying rhythms and timeframes of different kinds of messages. Now, I don't know if Googlebot actually indexes my dreams (tho I suppose if I blog about them they do), but Google announced this thing called Wave this spring that's a fair bit like what I had in mind.

Fixing the infrastructure isn't really the issue, though. It will help, but I feel that there's a more fundamental level that we all must take an interest in. It's that if we are to spend so much of our lives in message world, then we owe it to ourselves and each other to learn to do it well.

There are those who message artfully; my Twitter stream is full of them, as Twitter is still novel enough to feel playful. But I happened to stumble upon some old, old, old emails from 1994 the other day, and I was stunned at how playful they were; my colleague Roberto pointed out that this was pre-blog. Yes, pre-blog, and pre-Twitter, these were emails that played with language and sense and reference— and I don't think of e-mail that way anymore. I think it's because e-mail has gone from being a cool thing to a mandatory thing, and the joy has been squeezed out of it.

It's not artful that I'm asking for. The challenge is simply this: to recognize that we live in a message-oriented world, and that the game is not Tetris. Nor is it a race, or an obstacle course, or running the gauntlet. It isn't an adjunct, or a means to an end. The messaging is what we do today, it's what we create, and where we live.

In the time it has taken to draft this, I have 35 new tweets, 9 emails, 12 new posts in Google reader, and Michael Jackson has shuffled off this mortal coil...