Recently I received a message via FriendFeed, broadcast by a friendly associate, someone who is highly successful, liked and respected -- and deservedly so. To paraphrase, it said that he was in the delivery room, using a wireless connection, and the baby was on its way.
What a funny world we live in. I hadn’t known he was an expectant parent (we’re not that close, and we’re separated by thousands of miles). Now I know. And I’m happy for him.
Of course, in my daily information flow, or lifestream if you prefer, my friend’s headline carried just as much weight as news of the latest presidential poll rankings; the impeding Beijing Olympics; invoices I needed to pay at work; and the 15:43 train I needed to be sure to catch. They all flowed equally across my screen, carried by one of the many tools I have installed for sending chunks of information this way and that. These tools do not discriminate; they do not care what it is they’re sending. Making sense of it is up to me.
Arguably the birth of a baby is most important of all of these bits of information. But in the old days, given the extent of my acquaintance with this person, I might have learned of the blessed event closer to the child’s first birthday. Which is just about where it should be in my list of personal priorities (with no offense intended to my distant friend).
But we all live in public now, to paraphrase another friendly old acquaintance, Josh Harris, who realized this earlier than most of us. And this made me wonder what my friend’s partner, who was presumably in the delivery room groaning while he was tweeting, would have made of this.
I asked my one-person focus group, my wife, who in her deprived existence does not tweet, or twhirl, or jabber, or tumble or twitter (in the old days people were institutionalized for doing such things, especially all at once). She assumed that my acquaintance must have been joking. She made it very clear that should we ever find ourselves in the delivery room again (however unlikely), I’d best not be sending messages out until her work was done.
For all I know, my friend’s spouse may be an executive at one of these services. But my wife is not. Therefore, here are some tweets you will surely never receive from me:
“Wife is ovulating – wish me luck dudes”
“Never mind – she wants to finish that New Yorker article first”
“Still in the delivery room – everybody tweet her to push!”
“Wow - the afterbirth is nearly as big as the baby -- see photos on Flickr"
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