Tool usage harms brains: Chilling warning to tribes, from top neanderthal opinion former.

The increased use of stone tools and sharpened flints is causing serious harm to homo sapiens, particularly the development of their young, according to an eminent neanderthal, speaking at the annual anthropogenesis congress yesterday.

Tools made from stone and flint, when combined with strategies of cooperation amongst groups, are said to shorten hunt times, encourage speedier relief from hunger and as a result encourage lazy hunting and gathering practices.

The claims, made by Maily Daily, a leading voice of the neanderthal 'Movement for Attenuated Development' (MAD), will come as a worrying wake-up call for the thousands of families who had been reaping long-term gains from the use of stone tools as part of their daily lives.  

However, Maily Daily has struck a chord with the many neanderthal tribal leaders who are concerned with the technology that is ruining homo sapiens youth. "This new reliance on sharpened stones and group strategies has rendered the younger generation of homo sapiens virtually incapable of understanding the basic need to be able to scrape an existience with only their bare hands whilst living permanantly on the edge of extinction." 

Maily Daily went on to explain that, "They are throwing away millenia of experience and tradition for a brief flirtation with these untried technologies".

MAD, the neanderthal think tank, has also argued that these new tools and communication techniques are changing the way that homo sapiens thinks. Crude maps have begun appearing on cave walls reducing the reliance on traditional skills such as navigation by sun, stars and total guesswork. Indeed, homo sapiens has even begun venturing outside historic territory and is being exposed to new sights and sounds, that could threaten neanderthal culture.

Maily Daily concludes, "It is hard to see how this mass participation in the use of 'tools' and 'community' will not result in brains, or rather minds, different to those of previous generations. We neanderthals are not against the introduction of tools and communication, but the inherent risks are simply too great to allow this progress to take hold. If neanderthals don't take a stand now then we may, in just a few generations, be witenessing the sad demise of the overly adventurous and inqusitive homo sapiens"

Peer-ing into the news with twitter.

I registered on twitter about twelve months ago, but to be honest I don't think I really understood it. It was like standing in a room that everyone said was crammed with people, but with all the lights out and a set of earplugs in. 

Unsatisfying, disappointing and not a little disconcerting.

The simple problem was that I didn't know how to engage. I wasn't sure what was expected of me, what the point was or what I could (or should) expect of everyone else. 

Fast foward about eight months and something (I wish I could remember what) prompted me to revisit my stagnant twitter account. It could have been the moment-by-moment reporting of the bushfires in California or the use of twitter by the Obama campaign. Whatever the reason, when I did return to twitter a quick google search showed me that in a very short time things had moved on apace. There was now an almost daunting plethora of advice on how to use Twitter as well as ettiquette tips and tools that could help you ease your way into the 'twitterverse'. Upon closer inspection these articles appeared to come from two distinct sources:

• Bloggers/Social media fans who used twitter, were passionate about its benefits and were promoting the medium both for their own ends and for the development of the 'community'.

• 'Traditional media' journalists who fell into two camps. 

1. There were the  breathlessly enthusiastic who reposted the bloggers tips and tools with what seemed an almost obsessive desire to be 'on board' with the 'next big thing'  
   
2. Then there were those who were so downright dismissive or damning as to appear unbalanced in their irrational hatred of twitter and it's uses.
   

Keen to get on with Twitter, see what all the fuss was about and what I'd been missing; I took full advantage of both groups. The Guardian and the Telegraph provided handy 'get started' articles and the blogosphere provided the rest. Not to mention the frequently quoted, linked and promoted applications and tools designed to make the twitter experience a richer one in every way.

Within a few weeks I was up and running with an active account and, having followed advice from those in the know, found a group of people to follow who were 'influential' in areas of interest to me. There weren't that many people listening to me yet, but I was getting regular updates from a group of interesting influencers and opinion formers.

It was around this time that I realised that Twitter was starting to change the way I behaved online. An avid reader, browser and devourer of aggregated news - I was spending less and less time on these sites. I was getting more up to date and RELEVANT stories from the group I followed on twitter. 

I began to understand the 'marmite effect' that twitter was having amongst traditional media. 

Thanks to twitter, news is being curated and edited by the people, the news readers not the news writers if you will. In the same way that I get music recommendations, based on my likes or interests, from last.fm or spotify.com - I now get a large part of my world view curated for me by those I follow on twitter. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. A quick look at stories such as the Hudson River plane crash illustrate how powerful this communication tool has become as a result of its low bar to entry (anyone can post a story, from their mobile, as soon as it happens). For traditional news media this must be a scary proposition. The result seems to be a rush to proclaim the new (media) messiah or denounce the devil of triviality and narcissism. Whichever best suits your personality or world view, it appears. 

Interestingly, thinking back, I got my first 'in' to Twitter from the traditional news media and whilst I might get the 'breaking news' from my group of 'twits' we are almost always sharing links to 'established' news sources.

I wonder if it is time that more news media outlets took a balanced view of twitter and saw it for what it is. A large community, chatting constantly. Twitter isn't the news, it doesn't make the news and it can't reliably report it. But it can help break it and monitor it. With journalists on board it could be the best, peer moderated, aggregated news feed available.