The “me, me, me, meme.” What is it?

Cool tech geeks start something online. We jump on the bandwagon. Our friends see what’s going on. A crowd forms, asks questions, then follows our lead. Lifestreams form.

In the video game Final Fantasy VII, the Lifestream is a river of Mako energy coursing through the Planet. The Lifestream is considered the blood of the Planet, which in turn is considered a collective conscience similar to the Oversoul of transcendentalist philosophy, but not quite the same as the type of entity proposed in the Gaia theory.

Our own personal lifestreams, or “public timeline’s” if you prefer, are slightly more mundane than the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered “us” or “me” in some, hopefully non-banal, way.

We say “me” a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.

When we say “me” we say “we” a lot as well. The “we” message is buried in context of the “me” and provides the rich matrices upon which our lifestreams thrive. “ Frank is watching the Chicago Bears and blogging <link> – #twitter” tells me what Frank Gruber is up to, but the link was meant for his followers -”we”.

When Dave Winer snaps an iPhone photo in the Palo Alto Apple store, I see his Twitter/image post and also note, based on her earlier Tweet, that @StephAgresta is in the store at the same time. @SamHarrelson then notices that Dave might have captured @StephAgresta in his iPhone shot of the Apple store. I then see Stephanie twitter about a happenstance meeting in the Apple store with Dave, Robert Scoble and son. I know all these people, but am I watching a personal version of my own external life unfolding in a Twitter stream? Am I watching Dave’s? Robert’s & Patrick’s? Sam’s? Stephanie’s? Later on I notice (from his Twitter wake) that Robert and wife had their new baby and he might have been in the Apple store in connection with that wonderful event!

Now imagine a person walking up to you, whom you may not recognize immediately, saying “hi Dave/Steph, I just noticed from your twitter stream that you were in the PA Apple store and wanted to say ‘hi’ because we were in the same place at the same time. Our twitter streams crossed in time.”

Wow, new types of meetings are happening in today’s silicon valley technology stores … a new dimension to social meshing is occurring based on bridges being created between online and offline lifestreams.

Me. I’m in this place. I’m in this photo. I’m live video streaming you at this moment. I’m playing pool. I’m waiting at the airport. I’m on AirforceOne. I’m pondering my navel. I invented a new drug. I’m at a funeral. I participated in a Senate hearing. I’m blogging. When saying “me” we don’t like saying it into a vacuum, but that’s the way all lifestreams begin. Erupting from a birth-point in time. The spot upon which we first create a social persona and declare “I am me, and you shall learn more”, like some holy writ dug from the sands of ancient lands. In a world of 6 Billion people we are standing up to say “hello world – I am an individual.”

Now lot’s of folks are saying, “ya, but what about ‘them’, all of you ‘me’ focused people. “Them” – those outside our personal sphere, our socio-economic plateau, our comfort zone. “When you focus so much on yourself you ignore all those people around you.” It seems that if you place your thoughts out into the public consciousness one can be labeled “narcissistic” Who knew this would be the response from people who don’t do it, so can’t “get it?” Duh.

I say create a Twitter wake – drop your social seed and watch it sprout. “Me” “We” “Them” will intermingle. This is the power of connected networks of people.

Of course the solution to the “starting in a vacuum” problem above is simply to participate in life offline as well as online. The wetware networks feed your online social existence. Groupings, micro-crowds, followers, friends, whatever you want to call it, the systems of social interaction which we participate in will subsume our individuality to a greater good if we give at least as much as we receive. However, perhaps when we network in person, face-to-face we can talk about something other than “me” or “we”, I’m so tired of hearing “so, what do you ‘do’?”, perhaps we might re-focus a bit and put ourselves into the shoes of “them” and see what that feels like as a community after the “them” concepts we discuss filter back into our online “we” stream.

Since I first posed the question in April “Has a Twitter emergency alert system been built yet?”, I’ve noted that several other people have pondered the same concept. Some examples are here, here and here.

It has already been substantiated that when an emergency occurs almost anywhere in the world, the first notification of the event occurs online among socially connected individuals using systems like Twitter.

Social groups of loosely aggregated individuals with similar interests, microcrowds as I’ve been calling them, or groupings as Stowe Boyd calls them, seem like an ideal communication channel for use in emergency situations. Microcrowds overlap and each have “pack leaders” or “social seeds” with deep downstream social connections in the form of followers or friends. The leaders in these groups are generally highly connected through the use of communication hardware like WAP phones and laptops with EVDO connections so highly important information can flow through the #microcrowd channel in near real-time.

If Chris Messina’s concept of #hashmarks as an impromptu channel creation methodology is adopted in Twitter, then perhaps this can also be used to create a repeater system that binds together the alpha leaders of the largest social groupings and emergency response teams, thereby using the massive redundancy of social nets to ensure that important messages are broadcast far and wide.

Adding geo-context to the emergency message would be an important aspect to consider. Temporal-context would also need to be applied so that as the message ages, additional information and updates can be properly contextualized along the timeline of the disaster.

As our dated analog systems fall further behind the power and immediacy of social communication perhaps it’s time to propose an emergency social-repeater system, where emergency information can not only flow quickly, but flow to the people and systems which can possibly affect the speed of response teams and mitigate the negative effects of any disaster.

Even laundry rooms, like this one at Olin College Twitter now, so are you still waiting to create your own Twitter account?

When two washers, two dryers and a condom machine create content autonomously, broadcasting to the world their temporal status, available, unavailable, I smile because we are finally beginning to see a very granular point of view with web content.

Twitter is about “now” time statements. So LaundryRoom needs to continually ping their followers with updates, but they only ping when the status of a machine changes. The machine has a location that must be described in order to find it and the moment in time in which the machine status changes is important because as everyone knows, washing and drying machines are quite popular in large buildings full of students and you need to be on the ball to get a machine before others do. In this regard, Twitter is a great system to connect with a Laundry Room and a group of student followers.

Micro content regarding the status of machines is beginning to show up everywhere, from parking meters to washing machines, so why are humans so slow to adopt a more systematic organizational structure for geo-temporal tagging their own lives? We tag here and we tag there, and some systems add meta data for us, but overall we don’t yet use a uniform system for tagging our daily interactions with technology on a geo-temporal basis. The reason why this is such an important point to understand is because by adding Time and Place to our electronic trails, we can access our personal history and share what we learned on the journey. We might also pull other real or virtual people into conversations if we enable others to see where we are, when we are there. If my phone broadcasts my GPS signal and tells my friends automatically “hey, come visit me at this location”, even if I’m in a virtual world like SecondLife, the possibilities created are interesting to ponder.

So where Dodgeball has mostly failed to live up to the concept, perhaps other newer, simpler, more automated systems of geo-temporal “shouting” which work at a more fundamental web standards level, can gain some traction in the market and help us all connect more. Or we might simply want to wash our clothes and need to know when a machine is available in our dorm without interrupting our PS3 gaming to walk down the hall. I’d like to reserve the next available open machine….. Thanks Twitter.