Wednesday, January 27, 2010

learning more by listening differently

mom on her new hearing aids "BTW, I've never heard the clicking of keys before. I'm hearing some sounds I haven't noticed that I miss."
5:01 PM Oct 18th, 2008 from web

Some details you won't miss. You won't miss clinking keys, you won't miss the click of the latch or the smack of lips eating toast at the quiet breakfast table on a wet, cold winter morning. But when they come back, they come back like the smells from the scratch and sniff books you read as a child and now read to your own children, like the smell of the house you grew up in or of your favorite soup that Mom still makes for you.

Why bring this up? Because Twitter is like this. Well, it can be like this. Something ought to happen to enable it to be more like this. We live in a time when we can physically live further from our loved ones and still talk to them or see them on Skype on a daily basis. Incredible, yes, but still not, to steal a word from Apple's Steve Jobs, "magical." And yet Twitter allows us to live apart and know incredibly personal details - things we likely would have missed had we been standing right there - about those same people we care most about. Like we're reading their personal email, over their shoulder; reading their thoughts in the shower; listening to their music as they're hearing it make them happy.

My goal in life will be to enable the world to share more of themselves, not less, on Twitter. Yeah, just to see what people can learn from each other and about themselves through this remarkable new medium.

Keys