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I switched off everyone outside London at the beginning of the month, in what I now know to be the mistaken belief that the value I was deriving from Twitter was geographically-bounded.
I thought what was near me was signal, as often you could act on it. Y’know: “I’m in town and wondering if anyone wants coffee”
It turns out that nearly no-one I know is in town or wants coffee. It turns out – as so often through the twelve or so years of having a digitally-mediated social life – the noise is the signal.
In fact, the cross-time-zone river of mundanity is much missed in the new gig, where it feels a little wierd to be surrounded by mainly brits after such a long time in a multinational group of designers.
As much as I was convinced otherwise – and against previous experience of lists, forums and other digital communities – it’s as much the psychographic as the geographic, for me at least, with Twitter.
I guess the difference of these presence networks is that they can have the geographic so powerfully nestled at their core. It’s both/and not either/or.
So, I will go grovelling back to those I so swiftly removed a month ago and see if they will take me back…
Here begins the continuous partial apology…
Petafloptimism 
lol. I love this.
ain’t Twitter just the funniest most unpredictable thing 🙂
I tried hard to pretend I wasn’t offended…
Dood, the signal is only in your head. Everything else is just noise.
Right, I just have a habit of doing things in the wrong order. Had been reading a few posts of yours, looked like an interesting guy, spotted your Twitter screenshot, proceeded to add you as a friend, swiftly followed by actually reading your post.
So we haven’t met. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. Maybe you’ll make an exception and add me anyways 😉
Cheers,
Vero
heh. today is the first day in over a month that i check someone’s contrails (wanted to see what you were up to before asking you an old-fashion – what are you up to). it’s been weird to turn off twitter, flickr, google reader, and others. seemed to collapse my attention space to right around me, with extensions via my voice over the phone.
but, your misunderstanding of the signal is understandable, since you are surrounded physically with a bunch of interesting folk. but the tendrils of connection can extend farther, as you now know. us here in the great white north, so far from everything, understand the value of those tenuous non-geographical connections.