I just finished reading Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (here’s a TED talk summarizing his main thesis and here’s an even briefer summary from Frog Design’s Design Mind) and found it fascinating. Ridley’s main argument is that humans have escaped a subsistence existence because of trade and the “sexual reproduction” (in other words, the mating of two different things) of ideas that trade fosters. So societies that trade are continually exposed to new ideas, the cross-pollination of which leads to innovation. Conversely, in societies that are isolated ideas remains tribal, expertise dies with individual experts, and progress wanes.
Last night, as I was feeding my Twitter addiction, it dawned on me that Twitter seems to offer humans the maximum-perceivable amount of exposure to new ideas. My Twitter feed is full of tweets about politics, design, usability, healthcare, innovation, pop culture, and in the last couple weeks the TSA (but that’s another blog post). I have some lists set up but I don’t really use them, instead preferring to just get all the different tweets in one big feed. One tweet might be about challenges of running a remote usability test and the next might be about the relative merits of a new healthcare proposal.
So thinking back to Ridley’s argument about the importance of star-crossed ideas finding each other to advance innovation, it seems like Twitter could end up being an almost infinite fountain of creative sparks and new ideas. Ashton Kutcher caught a lot of ridicule when he said this:
Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — because the creation of Twitter by Stone, 35 (right), Williams, 37, and Jack Dorsey, 32 (not pictured), is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer.
But the more I think about it, the more I think he might be right.
