I wrecked these fingers refreshing

Wasn’t Twitter amazing the other night? I wish I’d taken more screengrabs. It would have saved me trying to explain things like this;

So the industrial revolution finished, and everyone on Twitter was pretty shellshocked by that. I loved Tom Taylor’s thing of ‘it all being engineering‘. Then, we got the Bond scene. Oh my god the Bond scene. James Bond is in Buckingham Palace and he’s talking to an actress that’s trying to play the Queen, and then she turns around and it’s the actual Queen.

At this point I hit refresh on Twitter and it’s crazy. Every single person is leaving some variation of OMG or WTF, with the best being Ben who posted ‘OH‘ down here [gesture], ‘MY‘ about here [another gesture] before ‘GOD‘ arrives. Amazing.

Then they jump out of a plane…

If I didn’t sound crazy then, I’m pretty sure I managed to when I described “an army of Mary Poppins’ floating down to drive Voldemort away from the NHS”.

Replaying the experience of watching the opening ceremony of London 2012 without the commentary of the pub I was in or the commentary of the internet feels like a value-free exercise. I’m sure it’ll stand on its own one day, but it won’t for me for a long while. I was squealing with delight until last orders.

I took one screen grab though. This, on the way home, as the parading was going on;

Because the injections of the bots, theme accounts, and inhuman actors into the stream was wonderful too. It’s not just the commentary that made Twitter wonderful on Friday, but the continuation of these stories.

Experiencing the process as a whole felt like watching Primer for the first time, or reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It was an experience that has changed how I’ll interact with culture.

Reacting with people in the room and reacting with people in the stream felt wonderful, and impossible to repeat. It’s likely to be my go-to example for just how beautiful ‘digital dualism‘ can feel for a long, long time.