The day Paul Newman died, Krista Kennedy posted to Twitter that she first heard of his death there.  Her tweet was how I found out about his death.  I also found out on Twitter that the polls had shifted toward Obama, that Becky Howard had talked on the phone with her grandchild, and that Billie Hara was finishing up her dissertation.  When I watched the debates, I watched them on my local NBC channel while I read a Twitter feed of debate reactions.  It was the Mystery Science Theater of politics in the social media age.

What does it all mean?  I'm not sure.

We're increasingly frenetic about multi-tasking.  We're getting our news in bites as well as in bulk.  We're blending our information streams so that social, informative, political, professional, spiritual, and any other label we might want to add all come at us at once and in much the same manner.  Major newspapers are tweeting events alongside amateur pundits.  This is certainly taking the upside-down, inside-out journalism that changed the world in the last election cycle to a whole new level, but what it means, I still don't know.  Maybe Clay Shirky knows.  Maybe some of the people in my Twitter stream know.  Maybe I should ask.

Aside from election Twittering and class Twittering, one of the most significant things I've seen lately was the storm Twittering for Gustav and Ike.  Social networkers got organized in a hurry and set up a pretty impressive operation on Ning to provide immediate and direct information about the affected areas--including a Twitter feed.  These kinds of ground swells of information organization seem to me to be the most important result of social networking tools.  Thank you, Clay Shirky, for pointing that out.  Yes, I did read your book.

Still, I'm struggling to figure out what I really want to say about it.  As Jeff Rice has pointed out, there's no shortage of idiotic ways in which we can overstate the importance of any given change in our lives. 

I'd like to propose a social networking presentation for TYCA-SE.  Maybe I need to hold off on that until I have something more to say than, "Gosh, darn it.  Dontcha just love that Twitter?"