For example cell-surface proteins and receptors in a way function very much like this blog you have here! Rather than photos and articles however, they contain notes in the form of “Hey, hey, I have Fas Ligand!” or “I have CD11…”, things like this act very much like a profile and an active blog in cell form. Similarly endocrine functions much like e-mail, or rather more like posting on some public forum, for everyone to see. Neurocrine even acts a lot like instant messengers! Taken to length, any form of communication has some sort of biological analog.

Dara, to address your q’s:

1. Exchanges of information on Twitter can culminate in some sort of act that might be considered as purposeful volition of the “super-organism”. Volition is conscious choice or decision. So, does this imply that Twitter has consciousness? If I were asked where my consciousness ‘resides’, I would point to my brain (It seems to be there, but I could be wrong). Is there an organ associated with Twitter’s consciousness? Does Twitter have organs?

——-
I don’t know… I guess no one really knows what consciousness is, after all. It’s sort of an imperfect symphony of desires of constituent parts of the organism.

As for “organs”, I think that subsections of Twitter will begin to specialize in a few focused areas. Cells come to specialize, and eventually “kidneys” and such will develop.
—-

2. What kind of organism is Twitter, something closer to a rotifer or to a primate? Could we make a ‘geneological’ tree of the different ’super-organisms’ of human networks (like a phylogenetic tree for living organisms)? What is the LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and where is Twitter in the tree?
—
I think it’s a pretty simple organism… Only a few million cells now, right?
—–

3. What will be the selective pressures that will make Twitter adapt and evolve? Is this super-organism subjected to Darwinian evolution?
—–
That is true…that evolution is often caused by external competition. I think there are little bits of competition in the network, though, that will cause it to evolve.
—–

4. You state that Twitter is bottom-up decision making and you imply that this is incompatible with top-down decision making. But as a primate, I know that in some cases I can use my brain to over-ride what the cells of my other organs “have decided” to do. Yoga/meditation and hypochondria are examples of biological top-down decision-making in action.
—-

That’s true that the brain can override stuff, but it still derives its “options” from bottom-up information gathering.

A lot has been said this week as to what the true adoption rate is of new Twitter members. While the pool of users may be important to the business folks and analysts to me it doesn’t matter how large the population is that plugs into Twitter. What matters most is the quality of people taking part. So far so good on that front. I’ve met people that I would have never had the opportunity to talk to with out Twitter… writers, business people, organizations, PR folks, analysts and even great photographers. Twitter will continue to thrive as long as the quality of membership is high. In turn ground up initiatives will continue to grow in this social media petri dish.

Twitter has continued to surpass the expectations of the nay sayers. I expect to be pleasantly surprised for several months and years to come all while reaping the benefits of conversing with my very informative network of contacts.

Jim
(jimgoldstein at Twitter

1. Exchanges of information on Twitter can culminate in some sort of act that might be considered as purposeful volition of the “super-organism”. Volition is conscious choice or decision. So, does this imply that Twitter has consciousness? If I were asked where my consciousness ‘resides’, I would point to my brain (It seems to be there, but I could be wrong). Is there an organ associated with Twitter’s consciousness? Does Twitter have organs?

2. What kind of organism is Twitter, something closer to a rotifer or to a primate? Could we make a ‘geneological’ tree of the different ’super-organisms’ of human networks (like a phylogenetic tree for living organisms)? What is the LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and where is Twitter in the tree?

3. What will be the selective pressures that will make Twitter adapt and evolve? Is this super-organism subjected to Darwinian evolution?

4. You state that Twitter is bottom-up decision making and you imply that this is incompatible with top-down decision making. But as a primate, I know that in some cases I can use my brain to over-ride what the cells of my other organs “have decided” to do. Yoga/meditation and hypochondria are examples of biological top-down decision-making in action.

Looking forward to responses.

Ultimately, social media is just a medium. It is only as good as we are and is merely a catalyst for our behavior. If people are selfish and inhumane, we will have a selfish and unhumane collective. If they are honest and compassionate, we can achieve great things.

I am cautiously optimistic. Hopefully people see that by contributing a little, we ALL get a lot.

I opened my feed reader this morning expecting to see more excellent HDR photography from Stuck In Customs. Instead I got a great dose of insight right alongside the imagery!

I agree completely with your observation that human-built networks will ultimately resemble biological systems. Without the humanity of a network, there would be no appeal to it’s users and no function that would better lives. Websites like Twitter are less structured than friend-based sites like FaceBook and MySpace. As a result I think that they more quickly resemble biological systems because they are more dependent on that natural evolution. Just as we evolve and adapt to our environments, Twitter will continue to evolve and adapt to it’s users.

What some consider a weakness of Twitter – only having 140 characters to express oneself – has become it’s greatest strength… brevity.

I wonder what government can be doing to use the power of networks to involve people more directly? This would require bold moves by each individual of government. Connecting directly with the masses holds great promise and significant dangers. But when everything is networked and connected, everything can communicate cohesively.

Regardless of your political leanings, I believe that many of us will look back at the Obama administration as the beginning of wide-spread government participation in social media. Sure, it was mostly used for campaigns and self-promotion, but it demonstrated the effectiveness of these networks and the expectation will only continue to grow with future generations. It will take some time for momentum to be generated, for marketing to be replaced with conversation, for social networks created for the people to be adopted by the people’s governments.

Secondly Trey, you touch on something very worthwhile in regards to economics. The example of the frisbee park is just one of countless errors in judgement made by our current government administration. As you wrote about Twitter, I though of a grassroots movement happening right now. Tea parties. Although highly ignored from the “select few” in office and mainstream media, the tea parties were a physical twitter gathering in my eyes.
It would be nice if our society moved in a direction where every day ciitzens had more say, but unfortunately, I am afriad we are moving towards more governmental control.

-Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty-

Ronald Reagan

I know a lot of people aren’t on Twitter yet, and they don’t really enjoy it until they are following at least 25 people they find interesting. Once you figure that out, it becomes “your” list, and then it just grows nicely from there as you find more people to follow.

Good thoughts above on governments and evolution… I’ve enjoyed reading the comments very much!