Before the rise of social media, fashionable radical individualism in the 1970s led to “the culture of narcissism” and the loss of the notion of transcendence, the certitude in the immutable respect and timeless importance of other people’s lives. It removed us from those nagging societal concerns exterior to ourselves, replaced art with confused examples of self-expression, and disavowed eternal moral absolutes, replacing the meaningfulness of life with postmodern nihilism and in general resulting in some bad cases of self-absorption that dissolved interpersonal connectivity. Ironically, since our identity is influenced by how others view us, radical individualism eroded our sense of self, not so much resulting in classic egomania as a lack of Ego and a failed integrated self in the Freudian sense.

And now, with Twitter, Facebook and foursquare firmly ensconced in our daily routine, some pundits fear that the ad absurdum extrapolation of all this is upon us, that “The Individual” has gone so far as to trade privacy for sheer public performance. Others believe that the technology simultaneously promotes just the opposite condition: that an “electronic mob” of 18^th century sensibility has formed, and any random kerfuffle can be magnified by social media into a tsunami of millions of petitions and protests demanding resignations, indictments, revolutions, immediate governmental action, or what-not.

On the brighter side, as the philosophers Hegel and Dewey would say, we are only individuals insofar as we are social beings. And to be social we must work in collaboration with others. One person’s idea to build a classroom in the jungle or feed the homeless won’t get very far if he or she is a crazed, selfish creature callously attempting to use others as a means to an end, no matter how benevolent the end. No, other people are our partners and collaborators in life, and that only happens when we all assume similar values backed up by personal responsibility. Only then can a merry band of altruists break the psychological, familial, institutional and governmental shackles of the status quo. It’s how individualism escapes the prison of meaninglessness.

And so perhaps social media is not just the wild, excessive sharing of self claimed by its detractors. By using social media to place all of our cards on the table, so to speak, we are not narcissistically beating our own drum for attention, but rather are exploring each other’s revealed self to better understand ourselves and thus clarify our self-identity.

Of course, social media networks encompass hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. A voice for activism and advocacy can get lost in the crowd. When asked about the “sheer noise” found in social media, Deanna Zandt, author of, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, said, “This is something people who have done advocacy work and social justice work have faced for years. They call it cause fatigue. People become immune to certain messages after a certain period of time. What we see evolving in advocacy work and what is clearly becoming more effective is not trying to reach millions of people so 200 will take action, but seeking out and targeting the 200 people already interested and engaging them directly. I’m sincerely hoping the spectacle model of getting the word out will go away soon because it’s not doing anybody much good, and people become immune to spectacle pretty quickly… One of the examples in my book that talks about this is a group of parents that were very outraged at the implementation of standardized testing in Palm Beach County, Florida. They started a Facebook group and ultimately ended up getting 8,000 parents in this group, negotiated with the school administrators and were able to change different parts of the policy. They didn’t have to get on 60 Minutes [to resolve it].”

Thus, “rightsizing” a social media group can be as important as finding the shared values and interests for activism and altruism.

One fly in this ointment is that technology is always a two-edged sword, and simply trusting people to use communications technology virtuously—or at least innocuously—in a free and open manner doesn’t quite work. The same social media platforms that promote the spontaneous generosity of hordes of users can also be used by criminals. There is a fear, for example, that terrorists are using online games to 1) figure out the layout of cities and the targets within them (e.g. their transportation systems) and 2) they are using the “back channel” built into these online games as a discussion forum to make their nefarious plans.

As psychologists say, sometimes one’s sense of identity can cause more harm than good.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Strange but true: The biggest reader response we’ve ever received from a single blog entry was our previous posting regarding the demise of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s print edition.

To answer why, I’ll begin by quoting an aged Groucho Marx reminiscing about vaudeville: “My fellow performers always say how they miss the great old days of vaudeville. Well, that’s nonsense. Romanticized fantasy. Life was tough in vaudeville. Cutthroat theater bosses were stingy. The decrepit dressing rooms were unheated and often didn’t have running water. Acts had to perform long hours in front of tough crowds. If the audience booed you, a hook pulled you off the stage. Racism was taken for granted. No, when people say they miss vaudeville, what they really mean is that they miss their youth.”

Likewise, my blog posting on the Britannica’s own last curtain call struck a nostalgic chord that resonated in the hearts of older folk. As high school students of long ago, they had poured over and extracted facts from their library’s set of those leather-bound tomes as they labored to complete homework assignments with Ye Ole pen and paper. Whatever the factual failings embedded in the seven million sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica printed and sold over the past 244 years, they all melted away with that blog post. Instead of profound ponderings on the demise of print, we were inundated with a tsunami of wistful recollections of no real consequence, other than that they were the thinly-disguised poignant longings of lost youth.

There was the fellow whose mother made a decent living selling a rival, The World Book Encyclopedia; the woman who recalled long ago sitting with a kindly librarian as she was first introduced to the Junior Britannica’s pages about animals and exotic places; the once-strapping youth who wanted to pay for a $1,750 set of the Britannica with his newspaper route money (fat chance of that) but whose father heroically stepped in and purchased it for him in the belief—as proclaimed by encyclopedia salesmen—that those 32 volumes could be the key not just to a successful academic future, but to a productive life as an American citizen.

Bittersweet memories, all. It’s amazing what reveries can be inspired by some otherwise forgotten volumes now buried in a landfill, or perhaps recycled into raw paper or, more fashionably, repurposed as handcrafted book furniture or amusing bonsai tree planters, like those sold by the Italian company Gardenkultur. (They drill a big hole in each of the books, seal them with waterproof insulation, fill them with seeds, then sell the resulting creations through—bookstores!)

Then again, perhaps we could assemble all of the remaining Britannicas into a literal tower of babble, as was done with 15,000 unique titles about Abraham Lincoln, glued into a 34-foot-tall pillar (book sculpture?) that graces the main spiral staircase of the newly-constructed Ford’s Theatre Center for Education and Leadership in Washington, D.C. It’s the ultimate architectural “fashion accessory.”

The whole presentation gives one the feeling that we’re dealing with a mausoleum of dead books, rather than a vibrant library or, to use a 1960s euphemism, “a learning resource center.” My friend the scientist and author Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973) used to joke about how “public libraries” were only open during daylight hours when working members of the public couldn’t possibly visit them, aside from housewives and retirees. Still, given just the right impetus—such as “closing the book” (literally) on the printed Britannica—we develop a sudden homesickness for those great repositories of knowledge to which many of us had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finish our school assignments, so long ago.

Yes, taking off our rose-colored glasses for a moment, the “good old days” was really an intellectual wasteland of simple moral certainty and naivety in a time of racism, clueless parents, political assassinations and social upheaval (not to mention playground bullies and a bad case of acne) but it was also the only time one could be carefree, ridiculously optimistic and mindlessly happy; when future responsibilities, trials and tribulations were, well, somewhere off in the distant, forgettable future. We can, I think, forgive ourselves for taking an occasional journey of the heart to that youthful sanctuary of the past where paper books, gas-guzzling muscle cars, little plastic transistor radios and politically incorrect humor are not drab and ordinary but strangely comforting. Ironically, it is the very technology that the older among us find so disturbing in today’s world that makes it possible to fulfill our yearnings for the glorious past, to experience its images, texts and sounds with just some clicks of a mouse.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Back in the days when Howard Hughes was just a student with a keen mathematical ability, he walked up to a casino’s roulette table and studied its wheel for several hours. He started betting and won $9,990.

Now, did Howard Hughes have the mysterious psychic power of precognition? Or did he, like the rest of us, simply have an “odds maker” in his subconscious mind, the foundation of our conditioned reflexes, where we are always computing the odds that given event A, event B is likely to follow? Our odds maker, always working below conscious awareness, pops up every now and then to give us a “hunch.” Since Hughes was adept at mathematics, he had an excellent mental odds maker, and so his hunches would be very good indeed.

Mathematicians would tell us that our internal “odds maker” is based on nothing more than “Bayesian inference,” named after Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), whose theorem made possible such things as pattern recognition by computers and has been used in many applications, such as identifying email spam by software like SpamAssassin, SpamBayes and Mozilla. Armed with the rule of Bayes, anyone can update the probability of an event as additional evidence is learned.

Some people can make their “odds maker” explicit and use it spectacularly well. For example, the British cotton mill engineer Joseph Hobson Jagger (1830–1892), more popularly known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” was a distant cousin of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. In 1873, Jagger hired six clerks to visit the Casino Beaux-Arts in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where they spent the entire 12-hour day the casino was open to record the winning numbers. Jagger’s analysis of the data indicated that one of the casino’s six roulette wheels was seriously flawed, with a bias that led the ball to land on nine of the numbers (7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28 and 29) more often than on others. On July 7, 1875, Jagger began placing bets and, despite the casino messing with the wheels, managed to take home three days later about two million francs in winnings, then about £65,000 (around £3,250,000 in 2005 valuation).

But is the “odds maker” really just a subliminal calculating area deep in the brain? Or is something far stranger occurring? Things become more complicated when we consider the bizarre experiments on “presentiment” by such scientists as Dean Radin and Dick Bierman, which involve emotional response in human subjects. The subjects view a computer screen upon which appear—at random time intervals—images that can be emotionally neutral or highly emotional (violent, sexual, etc.). Radin and Bierman originally measured the subjects’ physiological response to these images in the form of testing a finger’s skin conductance.

Not surprisingly, Radin and Bierman found that subjects responded strongly to emotional images rather than the neutral images. What is surprising, however, was that the emotional response occurred between a fraction of a second to several seconds before the image appeared! Professor Bierman at the University of Amsterdam later repeated these experiments, but he placed his subjects in a Siemens functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain imager. Sure enough, Bierman found emotional responses in brain activity up to four seconds before the stimuli, even though great care was taken to randomize the stimulus conditions with “replacement” so that each trial was completely independent of the previous ones and the subjects had no way to “foresee” what the future stimulus would be.

Now if we extrapolate this ad absurdum, we end up with a scenario resembling the one in the movie Minority Report, based on the short story “The Minority Report” by the inimitable Philip K. Dick. Professor Bierman might as well start calling his subjects “precogs,” those characters in the story who supply details of their foreknowledge to a “PreCrime” police department, enabling them to apprehend criminals before they commit their crimes.

Amazingly, something vaguely similar to Minority Report may be possible, and could involve social media.

First, let’s take a look at The Global Consciousness Project, which is truly one of the more fascinating giant, worldwide parapsychology experiments of modern times. The Global Consciousness Project asks the question, are we connected? Are we all connected in some way not yet fully understood by science but that is measurable in some way?

An international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists and engineers, the GCP has stationed quantum event-based random number generators (RNGs) at 70 locations around the world. Data from these devices are transmitted over a network to a central archive containing 12 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.

Now, here’s the wild part, as the organization describes it: “When human consciousness becomes coherent and synchronized, the behavior of random systems may change. Quantum event based random number generators (RNGs) produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. [Demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators, apparently “causing” them to produce non-random patterns.] The probability is less than one in a billion that the effect is due to chance… Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. The data overall show a highly significant departure from expectation, confirming our prediction.”

The biggest “success” of the Global Consciousness Project came after 9/11, when an analysis of data indicated a huge spike in the correlations. It was greater than any measured in any of the previous years. Compared with any day, 9/11 stood out. (Note that the GCP publishes all their data on the web so anyone can download and analyze it.)

Now, keeping all this in mind, also note that Yours Truly is attempting to run down two urban legends concerning this kind of research. One, dating from the 1970s, is that audio recordings of aircraft cockpits reveal that, long before a plane gets into trouble and/or crashes, someone in the cockpit puckers his or her lips and starts to idly whistle. It may even be a person who normally doesn’t whistle. Interestingly, among actors, whistling in a theater is frowned upon because it is said to bring bad luck to the whistler.

The other, more impressive (and perhaps apocryphal) story is a recent one—that somebody did a statistical analysis of police activities prior to 9/11 and found that, just prior to the attack, police all over the U.S. were inexplicably engaged in investigations and were generally “checking things out” more often than usual. It was as if this police segment of society, trained to be on the lookout for crime, had a feeling or hunch that something “big” was about to happen.

Ironically, in the landmark legal case Terry v. Ohio, Chief Justice Earl Warren held that police officers could temporarily detain a suspect only if they could articulate the “reasonable inferences” for their suspicion, and not merely allude to a “hunch.” Since Terry, the American jurisprudence has increasingly discounted the “mere” hunches of police officers, requiring them to articulate “specific” and “objective” observations of fact to support their decision to conduct a stop and frisk a suspect. An officer’s intuitions, gut feelings and general “sixth sense” regarding the detainment of individuals are all disallowed. (Despite their skepticism when it comes to the hunches of police officers, U.S. judges appear to be quite free to vocalize and act upon their hunches, however.)

In any case, if any of these “urban myths” turn out to be true, then it might very well be possible to detect upcoming 9/11 type terrorist attacks via a word/phrase analysis of the tweets, Facebook streams, emails, and other output from social media. If it works, the next question would be: What level of granularity is possible? Can we only predict major events like 911 and natural catastrophes? Or, like Minority Report, can we zero in on crimes about to occur in specific neighborhoods, or even in individual buildings?

It wouldn’t cost a whole lot of money to test this theory. If successful, it could signal a major change, not just in the war on terror, but in the detection of crime in general and perhaps even the occurrence of natural disasters.

Anybody up for it?

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

The end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries was the heyday of strongmen and “strongmanism,” those circus and vaudeville performers who used their tremendous strength to entertain an audience, lifting hundreds (or thousands) of pounds, bending railroad spikes, tearing telephone books and card decks in half, breaking chains, and so forth. Canadian Louis Cyr (1863–1912) for example, dubbed “The Strongest Man in the World” by various experts and historians, routinely backlifted 3635 pounds at expositions and once carried a platform on his back holding 18 men, weighing 4337 pounds (1967 kg), at an 1895 exhibition in Boston.

Long before the appearance of the neighborhood gym and chains of Vitamin Shoppes and General Nutrition Centers, these Mighty Men of Old were among the founders and promoters of the “physical culture movement” which gave men and women the hope that they were not stuck with the flabby, underperforming bodies with which they were born. They could reshape and strengthen themselves with the proper bodybuilding exercises and diet. (Of course, many of the famous strongmen failed to mention that they had great genetics to begin with. Cyr, for example, at the age of 18 lifted a ¾ of a ton horse off of the ground, the horse having been placed on a platform with two iron bars attached enabling Cyr to get a better grip.)

Needless to say, a good many physical culture strongmen made fortunes selling exercise apparatus, books, magazines, and lending their celebrity name to myriad products, just like today’s celebrities.

Despite their success, perhaps the most curious and little-known aspect of the strongmen was a kind of noblesse oblige these great and wealthy physical specimens showed their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Like those monarchs of noble ancestry anointed by God and constrained not to indulge in idle pursuits but responsible, honorable behavior, so too the strongmen, whose physical prowess ultimately derived from luck or Providence, became the most generous members of society.

Foremost among these was the charismatic Prussian, Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), known as the “father of modern bodybuilding,” who regularly performed feats of strength for American Presidents and foreign potentates, and was the Ziegfield Follies first major star. For all Sandow’s business acumen, he was a philanthropic fellow who contributed greatly to charity and spent time helping many unfit and underprivileged men and women, declaring himself “Amicus Humanii Generis,” a friend of the human race.

The philanthropic sensibilities of the strongmen of old have been carried down to the powerlifters and bodybuilders of today. One can easily add to the list people such as the famous Arnold Schwarzenegger, Anthony Clark (1966–2005) who  gave motivational speeches, seminars and one-on-one counseling to motivate children and prison inmates to improve their lives, and Bob Hoffman (1898–1985) the “Father of World Weightlifting” and founder of the York Barbell Company. Hoffman was an athlete, nutritionist, weightlifter, coach and philanthropist, whose York Barbell Museum and USA Weightlifting Hall of Fame still exists in York, Pennsylvania.

Lee Haney, who won eight consecutive Mr. Olympia titles, besting Arnold Schwarzenneger’s seven-win record, in 1994 purchased a 40-acre farm near their home and created the Haney Harvest House, a non-profit retreat facility for children of all races, creeds, and nationalities. Harvest House features nature tours, a petting zoo, and an eight-week summer camp for 12-15 year olds. Haney, who eventually  received a degree in youth counseling from Spartanburg Methodist College, said: “I wanted to be able to give something back.  I’ve been so fortunate to have a lot of good things come my way, and it all comes from values I learned from growing up.  If we don’t take time now to give some of that back to this generation then when will we?”

Paul Edward “The Mightiest Minister” Anderson (1932–1994), who surpassed Louis Cyr’s lifting feats by hoisting a total of 6270 pounds in a backlift on June 12, 1957 (for which he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records), was a devoted Christian who dedicated his life to helping delinquent youth via his Paul Anderson Youth Home. Anderson’s further involvement with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and other evangelical groups harks back to, and appears to be a continuation of the 19^th century’s “Muscular Christianity tradition,” which was a rebellion against the “feminization” of Christianity that was believed by some to be occurring, and used sport to foster moral values such as manliness and discipline in a Christian context.

Muscular Christianity’s origins can be traced to the 1857 publication of British author Thomas Hughes’ novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In it, the high-spirited student Tom Brown discovers fair play and moral uprightness through manly sports. Interestingly, the novel was read in 1875 by a 12-year-old French boy named Pierre de Frédy (Baron de Coubertin), the future father of the modern Olympic Games, who believed that “organized sport can create moral and social strength” and, after reading the tale of Tom Brown, began formulating the ideals he would later infuse into the Olympic movement.

Even the strongest Native American who has ever walked the earth, Chief Harold “Iron Bear” Collins, a full-blooded Lumbee Native American from North Carolina, Chief of the Lumbee-Cheraw, is not just a legendary powerlifter and strongman, but a well-known philanthropist too. (Not bad for a fellow who grew up in a home crowded with five sisters, one brother, and two half-sisters.)

We social media mavens and would-be activists can learn a lot from the strongmen of yesteryear. Many sociologists and psychologists would have us focus on the more complex behavioral aspects and environmentally or outwardly induced variables of altruism. They would like to explain behavior in terms of “rational” self-interest, exchange theory and evolutionary models of reciprocal altruism. They forget that even Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that, although humans may be selfish, they are also capable of generosity.

No, the insight we gain from examining the strongmen’s altruism appears to center more on fundamental motivation. No matter how many people we connect with over social media, no matter how much peer pressure can be brought to bear on a problem, to achieve anything at all, each and every one of us must have somewhere buried within us a spark of true philanthropic motivation, the mysterious altruistic impulse that has as its ultimate goal the benefiting of someone other than oneself. The origins of this are far more personal than societal or institutional: in empathy-instilling parental nurturing, compassionate role models of childhood and adolescence, and the positive feedback gained by our very first pro-social acts done without any external coercion. A youth experiencing enough of such positive feedback will come to think of himself or herself as “good;” repeated performances of such voluntary good acts, over time, increases the level of moral obligation, and the need for external motivations for pro-social behavior lessens and eventually disappears.

As the sociologist and Holocaust survivor Samuel P. Oliner wrote, “This self-perception… leaves them with no choice in their behavior toward others.” And so, in this way does the altruist become strongly linked to others through a shared humanity.

Can social media be used to help change us fundamentally for the better, rather than just magnify human nature? Who knows. We’ll just have to wait and see…

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.

Humankind has always harbored the utopian impulse, the expression of desire for a better way of living, often one radically different from the ever-inequitable status quo.

To some early colonists of the New World, the wilds of North America were a perfect realm to set up utopian societies, the kind that first appeared as literary fantasies, wishful thinking or speculations, as in the case of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. The rest of the populace feared the great dark woods to the west, as any reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels can recognize the archetypes of savages, sex and the Devil lurking there.

According to the historian Marcus Bach (writing in 1961), “One hundred and twenty-nine times in our history, people have banded together, determined to create a world within a world in which they would have friends to trust, work to enjoy, a faith to follow, and a chance to live their lives without conflict or fear.” In 1980, Robert Fogarty’s Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History included 147 leaders, 59 major colonies, and descriptions of 270 such social experiments between 1787 and 1919, many situated in (perhaps not surprisingly) California, followed by Kansas, Washington and Missouri. The rather amazingly long list of these groups include familiar names such as the Mormons and Shakers, and other, more obscure ones with enchanting names such as The Harmony Society, Separatists, Fourierists, Owenists, Perfectionists, Icarians, Transcendentalists, the Aurora-Bethal Communities, the Oneida Community of upstate New York, the vegan Societas Fraternia of Anaheim, the secular anarchist Llano del Rio Colony, Bishop Hill, the Doukhobors, Amanas, Hutterites, etc.

Despite their impressive number, as the historian Laurence Veysey noted in The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter Cultures in America (1973), none of these groups ever made a major impact on American culture. As Robert V. Hine remarked in California’s Utopian Colonies (1953), “Cultural radicals tend to seek self-development rather than political power. In their individuality and self-indulgence (ironically contrasting with the stance against prevailing individualism), they are destined to remain impotent in the realm of social change.” Indeed, they are often societal victims, as their pacifism or predilection for home schooling generally brought them into conflict with existing laws of the outsiders, as in the case of the Amish of Pennsylvania.

The German Jewish intellectual Ernst Bloch, in his 1200-page book, The Principle of Hope, found the utopian impulse in everything from fairy tales to the alchemical quest for the Philosopher’s Stone and St. Brendan’s search for the Promised Isles. To the great Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim, ideology is that which preserves the status quo, but the utopian impulse is what can transform it. “Real” historical utopias become frozen, stifling examples of ideologies, generally turning out to be dystopias gleefully abandoned by its members (there are also literary echoes here, as in Huxley’s Brave New World and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

As the sociologist Ruth Levitas has written, “Contemporary utopianism is different. It has retreated into the private sphere. One might cite the exercise and diet regimes in pursuit of the perfect body that are so prevalent in contemporary western culture as utopian in [Ernst] Bloch’s sense… Equally, the attempt to create a private utopian space is expressed in the emphasis on house and garden design… Public and private gardens can be seen as little utopias squeezed into the interstices of space… Holidays of course, always advertised as paradisical, are squeezed into the interstices of time… These fleeting utopias function more as escape and compensation, rather than having transformative or even critical power. They are expressive rather than instrumental… Bloch himself makes a distinction between ‘abstract utopia,’ which is essentially expressive and wishful, and ‘concrete utopia,’ which is instrumental and transformative.”

And now, in the new world of social media, we have traded the utopias of old for pure utopianism, but this utopianism is much more than the private meditations of a person sitting at a PC; it is an impulse that can lead to concrete results. Our social reveries in cyberspace are expressed not just in an abstract sense, but with a desired impact on society, or to remedy an injustice, everywhere, not just in a community walled off from the rest of the world. A single person can mobilize thousands of similar-minded people across the globe. They can contribute money to build a school in Tanzania, or fund the coffers of a favored political candidate. They can champion the homeless or bring attention to a deserving though obscure segment of society.

In short, with the onset of social media, the boundaries of utopia have collapsed in terms of both space and time. “Utopia” is potentially anywhere and everywhere, of any size, and fleeting or long-lived. What was once wishful thinking among small groups of people is now is a precursor of willful action by the multitudes, all thanks to the vast electronic connectivity of the networked masses.

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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.