Tweet - the new currency

Technologies created new currency. Paying with a tweet. It is convenient, it is simple. It works. I still can not understand if it is smart innovative idea or smart innovative idea which creates a trend. In the era of information, copyleft and torrents tweet has become more than a short message of 140 symbols. 

Pay with a Tweet - An overview from Leif on Vimeo.

You can pay for new book, interesting artwork, new font.

At Paywithatweet.com you can learn more. And you can sell something "for a tweet".

Actually, all our Twitter accounts have their value (which you have probably checked already at Tweetvalue.com ), and it means that we bring our value to those things we are tweeting everyday.

A clever young men came up with an idea of the Stock Exchange of Twitter accounts,which now exists in Russian cyberspace. There you can buy shares of a particular person / company / account, as well as to sell, earning this money. Check it --> Twistosk.

Which will be the next innovative step in social media-money relationship?

Who are Children Born in the Era of Internet?

This post is absolutely connected with the one called What Technologies are doing with Our Brain. But tonight I would like to share with you some thought, I found in a book  iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

According to authors, there is type of people born before Internet Era and in the Internet Era. As human brain is very plastic, there may have happened several changes, which we can not feel, but we may notice. During the process of evolution we gain some new functions and we lose some too.

WE LOSE

ability to recognize emotions. In research made by Robert McGreeven, where group of computer-addicted pupils was recognizing main human emotions worse than those who haven't computers at home. What is important human empathy have had an urgent, and life-important ability to survive. Using empathy human beings were able to hunt, to communicate in society and to understand emotions of animals.

WE GET

multitasking. All threads of information contemporary teenager meets, may be not as empathic as it was before, but it is much more diverse, deep and multifunctional.We are able to switch from book to movie, from movie to article. Imagine if our predecessors were switching from tiger to elephant and then to birds...

WE LOSE

close contacts. In past people were living/ hunting/ surviving in small groups with closest relatives and friends. Now the number of social contacts is enormous. Remember how many friends do you have on Facebook or Vkontakte?! But to most of them you are just ready to write "Hey, what's up? How are you?"

WE GET

new gestures. We recognize smiles, menu of the browser and also we are able to type on keypad with a speed of 200 signs per minute. We are using mouse or we are using touch pad with our fingers- and now this gestures are much more meaningful to us than to our ancestors.

WE LOSE

our language. Accoring to Noam Chomsky, grammar is inside our brain from our birth. General rules are included. Apparatus of grammar is common for every language, and the difference between different languages appears only when person learns languages. Now we included a lot more things in our language. LOL, WTF, IMHO, (:, (;. Internet like parasite is putting new formulas in our brain.

WE GET

computer as a best friend of a child. Children are giving names to their computers and the miss them on holidays. It seems like small ducks think that you are their mother, considering the fact if you were the first thing they saw after birth.

WE LOSE

slow reading. Twitter, MSN, Skype, SMS taught us to be short. Influence of the language on the ability to think is well-known. There is an opinion that our logical thinking was born with writing and speaking clear, with slow reading. Now for us is much more difficult to read articles and books than messages and statuses.  Text is not oral speech: you can compare parts, you can go backwards, you can follow the development of thought. Reader is not under the influence of speaker. Text includes more complicated constructions. Short statuses bring us bactk to exclamations ? Or they make us be more concrete in producing our thoughts?

WE GET

deep logic. The brain technique of reading web-page is absolutely unique. Hypertext is another type of reading. Here you can go deeper (move with a link, than with another one, and it  can be infinity). 

There was an experiment where scientist invited experience Google-users and newbies. They put them into MRI (tomograph), which were scanning they brain while they were making Google search. At the end, they found that those experienced users were using particular and specific zone in their brain, which were not active in the brain of newbies. This means that brain created/planned particular zone for the internet search! Brain is reading web with another part of the brain, than when it is reading book. This part of the brain is also responsible for the fast and intuitive decision making process.

What New Technologies are doing with Our Brain?

Many-years-question "Does 'being' determine 'consciousness' or 'consciousness' determine 'being'?

Today I would like to touch aspect of 'being'.

I believe you agree, that before having maps  we used our vision, smell, touch and other senses. After we draw the first map, our thinking became abstract.

After we  invented watches, people (most of) agreed on having 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day, 60 seconds in a minute. This made our world discreet and measurable. 

After we made the 'first book' and invented 'reading', we started to concentrate our attention  and ignore the distraction.

Every new 'technology' is changing our perspective and our way of thinking.

Every new 'technology' changes also connection between our neurons in our brains, changed synapses (some constant connections between neurons). And may be new 'technology' even caused a birth of new neurons?

Our brain always tries to be effective. Using some synapses more, brain (as Personal SuperComputer) uses some other less (connected with old behavioral models).

Internet as new technology changed our brains. In Internet we always deal with a huge amount of information, distraction, several parallel activities at the same time (reading, making tweets, replying mails, watching pics and videos, listening to the music, commenting, etc.) We develop our visual senses a lot, we notice graphical location of objects, we digest huge amount of information. Sometimes it is called clip-consciousness.

We jump from one hyperlink to another. And together with this we can not concentrate our attention for a lot of time anymore.

The problem is that concentration is fundamental in our memory process. It helps us transmit information from short memory to long memory. Our mental capacity develops only when we are able to connect new information with old facts and experience which we had lived.

I am writing this to point that the way we started to live is something revolutionary and evolutionally important. This is something we are going through, and probably we can not access final influence, final outcome.

But what is important, to develop in a 'right way' (I understand, that there is no 'right' or 'wrong'), we need to continue reading, concentrating our attention from distraction factors. 

Moreover, only by reading we are able to develop our abstract thinking, our right part of the brain. Cause only while reading we are drawing our personal picture of the book, our individual matrix, images and colors, heroes and relations.

Of course we can not reject using social media tools, cause it will cost us social isolation, but we can be smart.

With this post I just reflect on things we are doing everyday  while we make  preferences to social media friendship rather than physical meeting, while we agree on something with your colleagues via skype of gmail rather than saying a word in office or at home. 

More links around these topics:

• One of my first posts about books - In the world where the only constant is change http://iamannaskryabina.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
• The Swallows: What the Internet is doing to Our Brains, Nicolas Carr, http://roughtype.com  
• Some facts about brain http://www.factroom.ru/facts/tag/мозг

Thanks to F5 weekly free newspaper for inspiration, motivation and good material, http://f5.ru