Image by Federacion de asociaciones cannabicas via Flickr
“They have changed my life, insofar as they provided me with a new concept about what reality is. Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.
I analyzed the mechanisms involved in the production of the normal world view that we call the “everyday reality.” What are the factors that constitute it? What is inside and what is outside? What comes from the outside in and what is just inside? I use for this process the metaphor of the sender and the receiver. The productive sender is the outer world, the external reality including our own body. The receiver is our deep self, the conscious ego, which then transforms the outer stimuli into a psychological experience.
It was very helpful for me to see what is really, objectively, outside; something that you cannot change, something that is the same for everybody. And what is produced by me, homemade, what is myself, that which I can change. What is my spiritual inside that can be changed. This possibility to change reality, which exists in everyone, represents the real freedom of every human individual. He has an enormous possibility to change his world view. It helped me enormously in my life to realize what really exists on the outside and what is homemade by me.”
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There are many different ways that people are using Twitter these days. Just like blogging, I don’t think there is a right way or a wrong way to use the product.
Some are promoting their website and their brand. Jack was on Fox News today talking about how politicians are using it. Companies are using Twitter as a new type of customer care. Some people only use Twitter Search to see what people are talking about any given topic in real time. Some use Twitter in as public, always on messaging service. Thrid party developers integrate Twitter with their apps (I saw an interesting one this morning).
And of course, many people use it to answer the question: “What are you doing?”
For many folks that don’t use Twitter, the idea of answering that question publicly is confusing. Why do my friends want to know that I’m drinking coffee or going out for a run?
The Sunday NYTimes magazine has an article about Twitter & Facebook (and a Tumblr mention too!). The article introduces this idea called ‘ambient awareness’.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
I love that idea.
Read the full article here.
