TwitterVision

Today, as I was twittering my usual at work, twittering for the Institute and then twiterring for the Anthropologies twitter I saw twittervision and I love it.
http://twittervision.com/

What I like about it is its capacity for visualising the geographical, visual and textual information all at once. All of a sudden I was transported to Japan, with some Japanese students bing full after his meal, to a mexican guy who just woke up and was celebrating the day, and here and there all the twits, about all sorts of things, all across a landscape of notes, people replying each other, othere microbloggin like myself, a pregnant congratulations, links to students, seeking for articles, some celebrating 9am meetings...., Canada, Japan, Bankog, Mexico, Isle of Wright, Israel, all dotting the landscape, a new fro Tehran, Cairo, Chicago, Croatia

I also like the possibility of translating through, of course, Japanese, Spanish, English, Portugutese, and then those you can't translate but have the same sense of fast, short, twitts. I wonder if birds also have foreign language, and hear twits in languages they can't understand but they can hear, like I read and hear these twits...

The potential of twitting for understanding virtuality is more important than msg, texting and emails, the fleetingness of it is quite compelling, and like all twitting events you can not always catch them all, all that is not said admist the twitting of sounds online. I hope it will remain language centered, where people write in their mother tongues or whatevet tongue they use to communicate rather than a generic 'English', it makes the exchange far richer and equally compelling, her it is from Scotland, from an IPhone in Germany, from Taunton, from Rome, from Ontario. I do, of course, think the map is still white and centered on defined nation states...
brasil, paris, and then 25 minutes ago, 15 minutes ago, 17 minutes ago, 26 minutes ago, time also gets suspended in twittervision, providing a more intense sesne of virtuality that is not anchored in lineal concepts, including time.

Someon in India is telling me to be careful who to follow, someone in Australia is bugged, and socimen on Iceland is broacasting radio, in Japan someone calling home, in Sao Paulo commenting on football, I can't read Norweigian, in Cincinati they are listening music, and then other places, candyland, somewhere in detroit, japanese from Germany, Quatar is watchin him, Barneley on colours, Phoenix saving the wold, Brail commentin on a video, Luxembour on prime life, they are faster than my typing and the tweets keep coming up...

The Map has also a 3D view that makes the sphere go round, not defined by nation states but by the actual tweet definition of their locality, and it shows the globe in times line, I can see where it is light and dark, and its rotation along its different axis, so far it rotates in quite a linear way horizontally rather than north to south, it is so compelling....

One of the immediate thoughts that cross my mind is how the twit representation and movement of the earth challenges some of our current representations of virtuality and assigns locality and temporarlity in a simultaneous way than let's say, second life can not quite do yet, although it would be intersting to see second life movement represented like this too.

The possibility for also identifying faces of the twitters, or their icons transforms this journey through the world into a mythology of elements, all fleeting but equally powerful in defining interrelations among images. I wonder how much the different twits are identifying with the social and spatial concepts represented in twittervision an in their capacity to microblog thier realities, a sharedness of textualisation and iconography in motion. It deserves to be in my Altermodern blog too!!