#70191 by
ColorsFade
Wed Jun 10, 2009 7:59 pm
Twitter is just one of the many initial baby steps towards Borg-ism. Resistance is futile.
But seriously - think about it for a few minutes. A long time ago all we had was news by word of mouth. Tribes of humans could go months without contact from other tribes. Isolation was the norm. Humans in one area of the globe could make amazing advancements in technology, science or medicine, and no one else might know about it for a very long time. Information traveled at the speed of a man, then the speed of a horse. Then came writing and written mail, but the speed wasn't any faster.
Eventually the telephone, television and the radio shrunk our world. We were given more speed - more immediate information.
Then the internet. BANG - instant information. Instant messaging, e-mail, news that we could read about moments after it happened instead of waiting for the six o'clock news or the morning paper. And all the while these advancements feed into our desire for immediacy.
Now there's cellphones, iPhones, Blackberries, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We move closer and closer to a globalized web of instant information with every leap in technology. And physically, we've added in-ear cellphone jacks to our arsenal. You no longer have to actually open up your portable phone to talk; you can just yammer away and your headset does the work for you.
Twitter is a landmark, watershed moment for technology and information. It gets us one step closer to becoming a collective, Borg-like race. The next logical steps are cybernetic implants and memory aids. With an implant, there won't even be a need for an in-ear phone; you'' be able to Twitter without having to actually type anything or open up a keyboard of any kind. Soon, you'll be able to think, "I just bought a new car" and everyone who is "subscribed" to your Borg account will get an immediate update in their neural implant.
And adding hard disk storage to that implant as a memory aid will get you one step closer to mimicking a photographic memory. Who needs to actually remember the periodic table when you can just call up the last visual image that your eyes ever saw when you happened to stare at that chart? With your artificial "brain" tapped into your retina, anything is possible.
I expect all of this to happen. I also expect a huge backlash. I think the next great world war will have as much to do about religion as the previous ones - but this time it will be a religious war fought between tecnho-Borgs and "naturalists".