Twitter has just received an IPO that values them in the Billions of dollars. We see that its power is from the influence of the users that will remain with the business after it turns for-profit. The reasoning is simple: connectivity. Not on the basis of social networking, for there is Facebook to accomplish most of the "friending" and "liking" what nots. Twitter serves as the most effective tool for spreading imminent thoughts to the tweeter's network. And that is the main objective, at least in my opinion. 

Of course, many of my followers are my friends and family, and vice versa. They provide me news of their happenings--things that go on in their lives. But twitter also allows me to connect with political figureheads, celebrities, and monks. It breaks the ice and privacy issues by really just limiting the connection with posts that have a maximum of 140 characters. And I believe this is really all we need to stay informed, for the most part. So in the matter of my use of twitter, I would say we follow stellar time, where tweeters have no part in physically taking part of each other's role in our lives. Yet we influence each other with a continuous stream of our beliefs, current events, and knowledge. We may not consciously realize it, but our lives are all connected with every tweet we read.

 The Garden of Forking Paths is unique. Elegance would be the wrong word to describe the design of the story. Its complexity makes it difficult to understand the plot, and the switching back and forth of characters and places really undermines the conventional method of straight through reading, like we do in books. Instead, the texts themselves switch back and forth, like we do when researching online for a paper assignment. It really seems to be entropic unrelated to the other at sometimes when the paper requires mutlitple themes to be explained. Yet the end present the last piece of the puzzle, weaving all of the pieces on the table into a well written story.