Hive Gestalt

One of the most interesting visuals in the last several weeks was the footage of the people in New York surrounding the CNN truck which was charging their cell phones in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Dying to get turned back on.

These pictures are from a Greenpeace mobile unit that also provided free cell phone charging and solar power after the storm in Queens. People were frantically trying to get reconnected.

I was thinking about this earlier today and I am almost willing to bet that in our brave new connected world, people would pick communication over food if forced to make a choice. I don't know for sure but that's how I would bet. We all suffer from the same new disease of simply having to be in touch. Everybody wants to know whussup?

The people of Terra are pretty much connected 24/7 nowadays. My first impulse in the morning is to check the phone for emails when I wake up. Used to be the little light on the blackberry - you've got email! Like pavlov I can not wait to tune back in.

Then on to the blast, see if I have any comments, spam or whatnot. Texts, voicemails, the whole megillah. I don't do social media like Facebook, because that was way too much of an energy suck. Got enough on my hands. But a lot of people do.

Like Leslie. Lots of friends, I hear that she puts up a lot of interesting content. Must run in the family. Last week she got into a bit of a Facebook flame war with an old poopy high school acquaintance from Michigan. Unfriended. Heard about it from three different people that day before I got around to asking her about it. Everybody is aware of the slightest tremor in the cyberforce, the butterfly in Tokyo's flutter  nudging the bored housewife ironing her sheets in Covina.

Many of us are living in some kind of dual Walter Mitty cyberlife, tending an invisible global flock, that exists tangentially and remotely, in a corporeal foreign universe, sort of like Schrodinger's cat.

I used to be really on top of the news. Now when I find something interesting, my wife has usually seen it days earlier on Facebook. A powerful tool. The 24 hour cycle is definitely dead, we all need real time these days. And fast.

I don't use Facebook anymore, like I said. I'm too obsessive compulsive, not enough time to do anything else. This blog is plenty and more. I've heard from a couple people who admit to slightly gripping when I take a break. Interesting. When I get back I usually over compensate, so there is a fairly even stream of content.  Job doesn't pay real well and it has to be fun for all of us. Hell, I'm flattered. Got a compliment on the blog this morning. Newish reader said that it was really great. I said oh, you like the photography and she said it was the writing that impressed her. It made me feel really good. Waiting for a really big depression so that I can write some more fiction. Sort of how I roll. Scorpio thing.

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Theodore Sturgeon wrote a great book called More than Human in 1953 that grew out of his novella Baby is three, a book that I recently reread. The book deals with something along the lines of a gigantic "groupmind." Man, during his exalted period of "homo gestalt." A seminal book, I highly recommend it.

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I wrote this little story a few years ago, Lord of the Western Marches.

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Fascinating article at Floating Sheep. Folks mapped geocoded racist tweets after Obama's re-election. Alabama and Mississippi, you win again.