The dam broke and washed away my attention

Last week, I experienced a tsunami last week that took my time and attention span out to sea, now on its way to Hawaii. I actually found myself getting anxious with every visit to the channel, as I struggled to find readings, appropriate announcements and responses as well as missing both eluminate sessions due to work.

We need a google reader for the channel, standard syllabus formatting, a work scale to balance classes with each other, blah, blah, blah.... So I clocked out, forgot to answer my phone, read comic books for 24 hours and went to a college reunion. Nothing to tag or twit (do not worry I am aware there is a different verb) with which gave me sense of freedom to roam and anxiety about the mounting work load washing into my inbox.

I finally found my way back to school and read The Dunbar Number, which I felt comfortable with. My background in organizing groups in remote settings helped me feel like our inner primate still kept us from getting bogged down in big groups. Gifford brought up the optimum number in a creative session of seven which Chris spoke to when discussing Unstructured Trust. I believe there are many more factors why groups size is hard wired for survival and performance.

Like the arbitrators of social web knowledge, information as well as people seek flat organization that allows for autonomy and ownership of shared purpose. Teamwork at this scale does not require a single leader, just leadership. I see certain numbers repeat themselves in many contexts, 3,4,6,7,8 & 12 are used in every religion as a way to order important concepts, such as 12 disciples, 8 noble truths, 7 deady sins, 4 fold path and the holy trinity as just a few examples. What I see this as is unveiling our human software in the digital world, these numbers are what Dunbar helped with survival of groups.

I learned how Twitter creates back channels, which sound like a side conversation while another conversation or presentation is going on. The example used at a conference how the audience redirected the interview via back channel tweeting and eventually gave the interviewer questions they wanted answers to.

Power to the people, however the tags I added to delicious last week spoke to the other side of this activism, oppression for that same action by the governments of Moldova, United States and Iran in response to twitter feeds helping activist organize rapidly and mobilize to avoid police. A dangerous precedent which I have not seen a good response to. This seems like the creative commons has its head in the sands talking about good business practices, while the paranoid guys from the x-files are being arrested for using this technology for trying preserve what little bit of democracy is left.

Leaving political oppression via technology behind, the term, hashtag, presented itself in one of our Twitter Commons videos. While I followed the meaning of creating a tag that could help develop into a trend by aggregating more common words from tweets to a single tag. I could use some help here, how is this really different from another tag that catches the right word to help organize other tweets?