By Jane La Mantia de Pencier

The Health Strategy Innovation Cell founded The Global Accelerator Award. It's an award for creating buzz and chatter on the web. Why is there an award for chatter? Didn’t we get in trouble for this at school? What’s the value of buzz? I wondered. I didn't get it.

Then, a giant lever began to squeak in my loner inclined brain. I could tell there was a great and powerful idea attempting to bust the rust on my gears. A great force was pulling against my pompous singular stasis. I squeezed my eyes shut as if my sinuses might suddenly clear, and puffer fish me up into a new awareness. The pressure changed in my head. Pop. Pop. Stop! I resisted.

Steel against steel scraped and hollered as that giant idea pushed down on the lever of my stiff grey matter. It went down a quarter way, a half, and then three quarters. The gears lurched and clanged. Finally, as if with the assistance of all the minds in the world who’d already thought the thought, the idea succeeded. My gears sprang into activity. It’s about the whole! It’s about the machine. No, it’s not a machine. It’s an organism. No. It’s not an organism. It is machine and organism combined. It’s what happens when machine is used to connect organisms.

There’s a great original Star Trek episode that features some Kirk dubbed “aliens” who don’t have to communicate with words like we humans. The aliens have great big heads and on every Hallowe’en they have come to your house and stared at you without asking the old, “trick or treat” question. You, understanding, have stuffed their sacs with candy. These big headed aliens really know how to talk without mouths. They get their messages across. Well, I think we humans, and more species, do communicate globally and even through time without words, but I don’t think we understand this very well. In fact, I think it’s downright ignored, maybe even denied by most of us. So, we need a bunch of translator tools which bring us together in a way we find manageable; like a language broadcaster. How ‘bout a radio, phone or tv? No.

Twitter? The term sounds like something unimportant. It sounds frivolous. To fritter away the afternoon, I twitter. It just doesn’t seem to carry any significant bearing. Who made up this word? I’ve been watching fritter from afar. I’ve been trying to understand the twitter appeal. I’ve been watching people I really like and respect living all-a-twitter, and I’ve been trying to determine what it is that I don’t get about it.

There has been nastiness in the press about how it is a tool of the narcissist. There has been the suggestion that people just want to have a platform for their view. People just want to be published, it is said. They want something out in the world for posterity, I’ve been told. They want to be acknowledged. They are preachers without a platform, and bully bumper stickers without a bumper. Somehow that just didn’t seem like the all of it to me or even the beginning. It is after all only a 140 character bleep.

I’ve heard of people using twitter at conventions. They tweet and twitter a certain address and discover who else is attending. This seems like fun. They twitter where they are going to be, and propose meeting up.

“..@rbroom @genetics sympo ear wax lactose intolerance markers ...”

There is a tweet language and a tweet illiteracy.

“@bdnow tinyurl#...|

They even engage in the more prosaic messages.

“@rdnow join us@Donkey and Pickle 7,” they tweet.

“Oh, OK,” I say to myself. “It’s kind of like a modern-day walkie-talkie.”

But, nope, as that use may be a part of the twitter phenomenon, it is clear to me, that it isn’t the all of it either. I stand back. What is it, I wonder? The twitterers go on without me. Should I just get a twitter account and find out? But I don’t want to. I can’t stand jumping onto this sort of bandwagon. Can’t a person just live unconnected? Twitter is all facilitated by the World Wide Web, I understand. There’s just so much bursting-out togetherness. Why is it good? Is it? According to many, it is.

The World Wide Web and twitter are just the kind of tools we can use to get together. In fact, I think some version of them might lead to a world in which we operate as a large organism in a way that we’re capable and willing to acknowledge. That’s what twitter channels do. They create organisms of instant thought. The message is different from a text, or an email or a phone call. They’re like sound bites, but they are thought bites. They are little bursts of electricity from our brains. There’s a real modesty in that and there is play. It’s not narcissism. It’s about being a part of and giving to a thought process larger than our own. It is playful and we learn from play. It’s not perfect yet in how it functions but the potential for creating a big common brain is there. Maybe that’s why some celebrities like twitter. They can participate in something beyond themselves. It’s not so much about expanding their stellar orbit as it is bringing their identities into reality. Maybe it brings them into balance.

There’s something called Trendsmap that’s a bit like Google Earth. A person who wants to know what people are interested in can use it as a tool. Type in a topic or place and the conversations will show up on the world map. It’s amazing. You can see what is being chatted about in Lisbon right now. You can see how and where in the world people are thinking little bites of scary thought about lightning for example Right now it seems there’s a lot of chat about actresses who wear certain dresses, sports teams and a few flashy politicians.

The Global Accelerator Award is about the value of patient-led buzz. The buzz that is being celebrated circles around an idea that gets people thinking and communicating on issues that affect our health in a panoramic sense. It’s the buzz that creates organisms of thought that grow and become effective. The award celebrates an idea that hooks into the imaginations of a world of people who are all interested, invested and intellectually charged enough to create an organism based on the idea. It’s a buzz that allows for others to participate in the refining and expanding of ideas and helping these notions step over the divide, into practise.

Buzz is active. It’s instant. It’s pulsing. It’s pulsing like any single cell organism that is alive with the basic stuff of life: electricity. Bzzzz. Chatter. Bzzzz. Just before Frankenstein came alive there was the great voice of the electric charge, and that voice of life said, “ bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”......

....."It’s the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed toward the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
- Frankenstein

Ok, Frankenstein was a sad story and it was sad because the created individual had no community. The poor monster was lonely. So, social media goes beyond the one way use of the web. The electrified individual gets to link up in a world known as 3.0, and what happens there, happens in the musical “Hair”. This was celebrated in a different low tech reformative time, but the language is curiously the same.

What’s the buzz. Tell me what’s a happenin?

- Hair the musical

They sang, buzzed, and danced like crazy. The Global Accelerator Award is powered by the Health Strategy Innovation Cell.

Copyright Jane La Mantia de Pencier, 2009