We’re on the verge of a technological revolution. People are communicating in ways that earlier users of multimedia devices could have scarcely imagined. All you need to be part of a globally connected community is a GPS-enabled phone with a good uplink, subscriptions to a wide range of incrementally different services, a laptop, a good service plan, thousands of dollars worth of software, a bluetooth network, a backup harddrive (wireless optional), a RSS feed manager, and a few years experience of managing all of the above. Democracy has arrived.

Twitter is a great example. Its so new, and so powerful, that its very newness may be part of its usefulness. What is Malcolm McLuhan was right – that the medium is the message? Well these days, with products such as Twitter, TweetDeck, Tweetface, Tweettree, Tweetringmuscle and the fabulous new John Tweet Gacy, it could be that the medium is now the medium is the message. We’re able to take 140-character proclamations from bored agents of the overeducated middle-class anywhere we want – on an Apple iPhone, Apple MacBook, Apple Macbook Pro, Apple iBook (though we really should upgrade!), or a Linux-based mini-PC if our consultancy partners require us to have a Windows desktop.

Using Twitter may be the most important thing that a person can in the today’s media ecology; without participation, all the technology in the world is not going to help anybody. Imagine how much better off the people of Darfur will be when they are able to use Twitter accounts (or any of the subsidiary services) to feed each other needs of an impending Janjaweed militia attack? Ground-up organising has proven, in the election of technologically-aware zeitgeist-politicians like Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd and Silvio Berlusconi, that it is possible for the people to take the power back from the static old forms of power.

But we can’t stop at Twitter. Twitter is already going too slow. We now need to think laterally into new kinds of newness, so that the news of tomorrow can be transmitted as fast as we can communicate – the event horizon of media, of course, is a totally unmediated system of instantaneous communication emanating from each event, cause or other newsbit. Ultimately, we could dream that a giant communication tower that was crowdsauced from a swarm of angel investors could be built somewhere convinient, such as Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq. Building towards that goal, though, is what we have to do right now, to make our current news even more new.

Introducing the Tanner Wakefield solution: Babl.