Carl Jung, The Borgs & Twitter

Carl Jung believed in a collective unconscious shared by all members of a species. This idea echoes in Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance where he posited that acquired changes in one individual of a species will instantaneously benefit other members of the same species.

Subsequently, wouldn't it make sense to think that Twitter is a new medium capable of broadcasting the collective unconscious to the world and can therefore modify humanity as a whole through our sharing of conscious & unconscious thoughts?

One may argue that Tweets aren't unconscious but many Twitterers will answer that most of their tweets are either semi-conscious or at least less censored by their super-ego than oral speech.

I can't help but think about the Borgs in Star Trek that are connected to "the Collective" via a subspace link in a somewhat similar fashion than my favorite aforementioned social network. They are all inter-connected but this network deprives each individual of their freedom. Call me an optimist, but I believe that Twitter is, on the contrary, a powerful liberating tool that will enable us to better understand our neighbors as well as our species in its entirety.

Let the little bird tweet and liberty will certainly ring!

Twitter & The Time Machine Paradigm

As I finally managed to use the word "paradigm" in a post title, I'm sure it will be read by millions of highly intelligent people so I'm really really going to be very cautious with what comes next.

The advent of social networks and the multiplication of tweets, facebook posts, instagram pictures, tumblr entries etc. have dramatically changed the nature of the Internet by speeding up its evolution and relevance.

I tweet, you tweet, we all tweet. We leave digital artifacts of our lives at any moment and from anywhere. This, in turn, lets us interact with other people though we may never meet them in real life (IRL). There is no doubt, in my mind, that this has a profound impact on the way we relate to the world and one another.

Have you ever realized that Twitter & social networks in general constitute time machines? What better way will future digital archeologists have in order to understand the past than to go back in time by exploring its tweets? How intriguing can it be to just go back to the twitter timeline at the time of a historic event so as to cease the thoughts of the many?

Think of this in terms of "what if Napoleon had had a Twitter account?"

Mini Connected Review

My previous post was all about BMW ConnectedDrive and BMW Apps. This one is about Mini Connected which is very similar to what is available on the BMW side of things.

One big difference with Mini Connected is that it does not come with a sim card so all "connected" functions use your iPhone data connection. In fact, what Mini calls "Mini Connected" is almost the same thing than what BMW calls "BMW Apps" (and not BMW Connected as you might have thought).

Mini Connected enables you to display your Facebook & Twitter feeds, use Google Send to Car and listen to webradios. The interface and functions are almost identical to what I described in my previous post about BMW Connected.

The same annoying bluetooth audio streaming deactivation happens when you plug your iPhone in the snapin but you can fix it in the same way that I previously described:

RockMelt Rocks

I've just installed the brand new and innovative RockMelt browser and I'm loving it. RockMelt smartly integrates your Facebook and Twitter accounts in their chromium-based browser. Think Chrome with deep Facebook, Twitter and RSS feed integration and you will understand what it is about! I have a limited amount of invitations left so if you're interested, just drop a comment with your email address (I will edit your email address after the invitation is sent).

Twitter, Build-Your-Own-Cult & The Prophet Engine

It has just come to my  attention that Twitter is a service that enables anyone to become a cult leader or Prophet. By displaying the amount of followers you will entice through your 140-character psalms, it has the ability to turn anyone's popularity into a huge influence to the world. In that regard, Twitter may be viewed as the realization of Bergson's prediction that the essential function of the universe is to become a machine for the making of Gods.

Granted, I did not manage to put all this in less than 140 characters so I'm out of the race to become a Prophet or Cult leader, but still you have to behold this paradigm.

You might also ask why I keep quoting Bergson in my bog. Well, probably because he is the only philosopher I have ever read and by read I mean memorized one sentence to pretend I'm smart and interested in philosophy.

The Complete Unabridged Partial Guide To Living The Life 2.0

If living the life seems like a dream to you and you think you'll never be able to be successful enough in order to achieve it then focus on something even better: The Life 2.0. Luckily, you happen to be reading this post where  I intend to give out a few tips on how to live the Grand Life 2.0!

First of all, you should realize that living the old-fashioned way, as opposed to the digital Life 2.0, is out-dated. None of your geek friends will find you cool if you continue to avoid new technologies and stubbornly claim that they are useless. Embrace your digital self and try to excel at your new life. Everybody around you will end up copying you (or unfriending you).

Here are the few apps and habits that you should focus on mastering in each aspect of your life:

1) Music: Don't listen to CDs anymore! Use Spotify, Pandora or Deezer. They're music streaming services that, for a limited monthly fee, allow you to listen to almost all music. Don't own your music. It's too old-fashioned, rent and stream it. When you're invited to a private party, replace the DJ's iPhone with yours and play hip hop when everybody wants to listen to techno music. They will love it (or might get yourself kicked out of that party).

2) Letting your friends know where you are: Don't call your friends to let them know where you are or enquire about their location. Check-in using Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Yelp, Plyce, Brightkite, Twitter AND Facebook. This will allow you to never be bored ever again as you will use most of your time to check-in from places to places on your Smartphone. Try to take pictures while you're at it. None of your friends will find them interesting but it will make you lose a lot more time. Moreover, strangers may like your pictures more than your friends and in turn, you will broaden your horizons by getting to know many perverts whose path you would never have crossed otherwise. Always keep in mind that there is no such thing as a check-in to be ashamed of (think toilets, bedroom, seat 45E on a plane).

3) Letting your friends know what you eat and drink: Use the aforementioned social networks to accurately document everything that will go through your intestines and bladder. You will manage to alienate a lot more friends who will be horrified by your lack of concern for your own health.

4) Use cloud storage services: I'm not talking about parking your private jet in the clouds but rather about keeping a copy of your precious files in the clouds in case anything would happen to your computers or home. Great services like SugarSync or Dropbox let you save all your digital data online and synchronize it across multiple computers.  Your friends' jaws will drop when you show them that you can access all your files from your smartphone, explaining: "This is panmnesia, I can access all my data and knowledge anywhere, anytime. Isn't it cool???". They will literally think: "that guy suffers from OCD, let's avoid him".

5) Movies: The Holy Grail of Entertainment! Get rid of your cable provider. How could you have time to watch anything on TV since you're constantly using Foursquare? If you happen to be dying to watch a specific movie or series, rent them on iTunes and watch them on your iPad in the toilets. It's probably the calmest place on Earth. Make sure you document having watched this movie on Miso and your location at the time on Foursquare.

6) Books: Buy a Kindle to show off, install the Kindle app on your iPad or use iBooks. Anyway, this is just to show off. Who has time to read nowadays? I don't... I never did either... Ok, so this might be due to the fact that I'm lazy. It might indeed have nothing to do with the digital revolution. I dread the birth of a social network like Miso dedicated to books. Everyone will know I'm not as smart as I try to make everyone think I am.

7) If you're into onanism, try Chatroulette!

And if you know BASIC:

8 GO TO 1


#Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I Was Abducted By Aliens In My Sleep

I had the greatest idea of all ideas last night as I decided to watch The Fourth Kind, a horror movie about alien abductions. What better way to find sleep on a Sunday evening than to be thinking about alien abductions? Evidently, I had one of the best nights of sleep ever and I would advise anyone to watch this movie alone in the dark at night. Although it is supposed to depict real events that occurred in Nome, AK in 2000, I find it far-fetched and hard to believe. Main character, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler, was supposedly abducted by aliens in her sleep. Doesn't this sentence say it all? In my dictionary, being abducted in one's sleep equals to dreaming of being abducted. In addition, the main proof of alien abductions is given through Recovered Memory Therapy, a practice known to be non-scientific and unreliable. The most dramatic and scary scene is that rumored abductees speak Sumerian under hypnosis and trance. Well, Dr. Tyler has books about Sumerian on her desk. So it does not surprise me at all that her unconscious mind is familiar with some of its vocabulary.


In summary, although I dreamt last night that I was being abducted by aliens, I doubt aliens would go through the trouble of abducting earthlings just to drill through their skins and poke them. Unless, they invented a sport whose purpose is to drill as many holes as one can in an earthling, it would just seem like an awful waste of time and resources on their part. And seriously, if aliens have already visited Earth, how come they never left any comment on my blog? I check my stats regularly and Google does not mention any connection from outer space. Wouldn't intelligent lifeforms from outer space at least try to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter? The fact that they haven't done so yet makes it clear to me that they're either using AT&T or haven't visited earth yet.

Note: Once again, Hollywood shows that shrinks should not be taken seriously as most of them are mentally ill in the first place. It's such a classic that everytime I see a shrink in a movie, I can safely bet he or she is the bad guy!
Note 2: All the original documentary footage featured in this film was shot by the filmmakers. The whole movie is, of course, a clever hoax.

Uber-Communication

The rise of new technologies has lead to the advent of a new way of communicating.

Whenever someone sends me an email or leaves a message on my voicemail, I don't feel bound to answer them using the same means of communication they used to contact me. Answering a long voicemail can sometimes take a 10 second text message. Using Twitter to organize a dinner with friends can sometimes be much more convenient than email (that is when it comes to a dinner with tech-savvy friends of course).

Maybe new technologies have given us the opportunity to become lazy communicators in the sense that we now have a tendency to use the easiest way of communicating (not necessarily the most politically correct one) in a particular situation. However, the decrease in form has also given us the ability to interact a lot more and with many more people than before.

I can't even begin to think of what's going to come next in terms of communication as there are more and more options available... To name of few: Landline phone, cellular phone, email, text messaging, instant messaging (text, audio, video), Skype, VoIP, Web 2.0 social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Seesmic, Jaiku, Lindedin, MySpace, Orkut etc...).

Who could ever deny that what differentiates us from animals is language?