Is 1984 upon us?

Not quite, I’d say. Though, Twitter sometimes comes scarily close to being the initiator of a voluntary 1984-esqe thought monitoring experiment.

Case in point, tiwstori, which promises you endless hours of fun reading other peoples’ thoughts; worldwide, in real-time. Generated on-the-fly through summize, the site displays a stream of consciousness with thoughts grouped together by a few select keywords, such as “I love”, “I hate”, “I believe”, etc. It’s quite interesting to see what other people are thinking, but also disturbingly addictive.

Twitter is cool for keeping in touch with your friends, but using it to keep in touch with the entire world is something else entirely. I think it would be very interesting to do some analysis on the content of twitter to try and see if you really can get a worldwide(ish) snapshot of peoples thoughts. This kind of data would be a boon to market researchers and advertisers, which is, I think, part of the reason that many blogs hosting services, and other services like Twitter, are able to offer so many services for free: they’re working with advertisers both publicly (through ads on their sites) and perhaps not so publicly, providing either the methods, the data, or both, to fully analyze the current state of mind of consumers and netizens alike.

Maybe that’s a conspiracy theory, but I believe there must be some truth to it. I can’t be the only person to postulate on the worth of this kind of data.