IkoStar

A letter from England to Australia : 2nd June 1838

In 1838 when you said goodbye to your family (…down on the rainy Liverpool docks, among the umbrellas, waving, waiting, letting go and leaving… “there, there Mrs Smith. Let’s be going home now. We’ll have ouselves a nice cup of tea… there, there…“) and headed to a new life in The New World, chances are it was for good. You weren’t ever going to see them again.

People wrote. A lot. 14,500 of Charles Darwin’s letters have recently been put online (his Beagle voyage was around this time) - and because paper was expensive and aeroplanes and telephones hadn’t been invented yet, people occasionally made the most of the available space and wrote on the same paper several times in different directions. Which is what’s going on here. It’s not scribble. Someone would have read this, hanging on to every word - because it was the only connection they had.

I have spent most of my life on the other side of the planet from my family and people and places I love (and did actually first come to NZ by ship). I’m dual British / NZ and have spent about half of my time in each… and occasionally I feel the old familiar sting of seperation… people are getting old with out me. You forget for a while - busy with life, then it all comes back… sitting in a line of traffic or late at night when drunk, alone etc… but it’s nothing like it was. We’ve got it easy.

It must have been incredibly hard for people in the old days, and these letters speak to me of this heart-ache like nothing else. I first saw them in a museum in my home town - about 30 years ago… and the other day went to see the curator and got her to scan some of them for me.

Fast forward.

There are these things today called QR Codes - which as far as I can gather are a revisiting of the same principle - two dimensional bar codes.You can read them with your phone etc. I guess it’s inevitable really - seeing as compression of more and more information into smaller and smaller spaces has become such a tech driver. I’m guessing there will be 3D ones at some point, when 3d printing comes of age etc.

Anyway, the driver behind the letter (and the code for that matter) isn’t so much conservation of space as communication. And that is why, this http://www.twitter.com is more of an achievement than this:

The tower is a tower. The tallest one so far, granted, but at the end of the day it’s vanity (as is the way with towers, as any old gypsy could tell you). Twitter on the other hand answers to a human need and is transformative at the same time. It kindof makes us more than we were before… which is funny, because when I first heard of it, I thought it sounded like an utterly stupid idea. I was not an early adopter.

In a lot of ways it’s taken over from email - it allows you to keep in touch with multiple people at an almost minute by minute level (not quite, but you get the idea) in real time. It allows you to be in touch, but casually… without the formality of an email or an sms (and can you believe you’d ever hear those words?)… there’s isn’t a specific person-to-person intent, and that makes it much easier to be closer.

My Twitter circle is about 160 people - all over the world, but mostly England… friends who are now 22,000 miles away (as well as people I don’t know). They wake up when it’s getting dark over here. My winter is their summer. “Heading for the beach avec ma famille. Brighton, I love you!”, “Meeting in London. Waiting for the train. Tired. Bored.”, “3am. Insomnia. Arggghhh”. I even follow people who’s language I don’t understand because it makes me feel… in tune. Twitter has allowed me to get to know people better than I did when we were living in the same place. It has shrunk the distance between people, including (sometimes) the tyranny of distance that can exist in a single room.

So there you go.

The Tower and The Network - the two symbolic poles of 21st century political dynamics… maybe earlier as well, but especially now. Twitter is banned in the country where that tower is being built, but the tower is a tower. Paper beats stone. Eventually.