It's easy to remember the pre-Twitter era. Bluebirds flew by us without notice. We could compose thoughts in full sentences, paragraphs, even. Hashtags were called "pound" signs and e-mail was the primary means of communication. We could pretend we were unaware of what others anywhere on the planet were doing at any point in time.
But today, it doesn't seem that there was a time before blogging, before Web 2.0, before WordPress, before people wanting (or needing) to express themselves in words and pictures to others who might have an interest and the time to read, to comment and write their own blogs.
It's even more difficult to remember a time before mobile phones, before finding your friend in a crowd by calling them, a time when the most common question asked on the phone was not "where are you?" because you could only be at the place where the phone was attached to the wall.
There have been a million blog posts about the speed with which we, as individuals and as members of a larger society, are changing. And even a million more posts about the disruption that all this "connectedness" has caused and will cause. Being more connected, more closely connected seems the direction in which we are inevitably heading.
Spimes are hyper-connected. In fact, they don't exist without being connected intermittently or continually. It will not be long before people will be unable to remember today, a time before all their objects were sensing, tracking and being tracked. A time when only "big things" like trucks, trains, planes and ships containing valuable goods and people were tracked. It's not clear at what point the connectedness reaches its peak.
Will it ever? Will there ever be a time when people say "well, that's sufficient" to their state of connectedness and awareness of their world and turn their attention elsewhere?