Ironically, I first signed up for Twitter some years back because I had heard a tale about a journalist who was arrested in Egypt. The story was that he managed to use Twitter to alert his editor and others outside the country. They then helped him get released. Was that story true, back then? It sure is credible now.

The process has attracted some powerful voices. Scanning Twitter feeds in the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered Twitter had emerged from an early stage I’ll call: “I’m cleaning the catbox right now,” to the major tool for democracy I hoped it might become.

The prompt for Twitter’s 140-character post now reads: “What’s happening?” And a lot is. I’ve read dispatches from Mother Jones Magazine, tweeting updates from the streets of Cairo, and later, from Wisconsin. I’ve found a a link to a YouTube video of Margaret Atwood’s keynote at the Tools of Change conference in New York, speaking about the future of publishing – a hot topic as Borders bookstores enter bankruptcy. I’ve found a link to a photo of Steve Jobs and other high tech titans at dinner with President Obama. I’ve studied up on book design on a linked page showing last year’s most favored font faces and even found a tweeter covering Wikileaks releases.

In short, Twitter is providing, in almost real time, the service editors and publishers – those who decided what was news or publishable – used to be fond of calling curation. But the curation’s in more hands now: It’s in the hands of the tweeters as they describe open cities and the shifting stakes ordinary people hold in the planet’s future. (And by ordinary people, I mean artists, writers, civil servants, laborers, bazaar vendors, bloggers and those who aren’t rich, people who read cereal boxes, news junkies and lovers of books).

Curation’s also in the hands of familiar magazines like Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Granta, the New York Review of Books; think tanks like the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and the writers’ organization, PEN. These have ventured to establish feeds among the flock of less traditional tweeters.

The curation’s in my hands, too, as I make cautious decisions about what to skip and whom to follow.

Twitter’s potential to unify a global or a local village was always there. In 2010, our local fire departments began tweeting announcements about which roads were closed – a real service in a storm-prone rural area, where trees smash down in the winter wind. This week, I spotted an icon for tweets covering emergencies in the San Francisco Bay Area and another for San Francisco local news. I saw a picture of the Bay Bridge repairs which will be rerouting traffic and a newsfeed piping up from Berkeley. I saw a photo of a protesting teacher singing outside Wisconsin’s state capital.

This is not your grandma’s 2008 Twitter. Or even your offspring’s. A technical novelty with a lot of promise has hatched into an vibrant, inclusive infrastructure.

In her brilliant keynote speech to the Tools of Change Conference, novelist Margaret Atwood explained the changing economic relationship between authors and publishers. Using her own hand-drawn image of a bulging publishing pie, she traced the writer’s shifting share from the days of illuminated manuscripts onwards.

This metaphor suggests to me an equally ancient pie image – the one from the nursery rhyme. In this, our Twitter era, the pie before the king has been pried open; the crust has split away. The birds are emerging, fluttering. They are spreading their wings. They are singing out. And what a sight it is!
© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, a memoir of living on a boat at the heart of the technical R & D world. You can find her on Twitter.

I haven’t heard much from the relative lately. I suspect there are more frequent communications on her Facebook page. But I haven’t looked. Suppose I “friend” her? Will the writers’ organization I belong to then be treated to discussions of our extended family’s baby pictures?

Can I count on Facebook to keep these currents flowing separately?

Facebook pages are free and they are available worldwide. At a convention, I met Pakistani journalists, also using Facebook. It’s great to have international colleagues, but I suspect we have very different feelings about a woman’s role in society. Should I share my history as a feminist editor-a history well-known to my friends? Or should I seek out some professional common ground without giving out quite so much information?

Facebook has privacy standards, but they are still evolving. And so am I. I am still pondering which way to face in a world where all our faces are increasingly public ones. And as Facebook and other social media continue to grow, I am wondering whether that choice will even continue to be mine.

A friend tells this second-hand tale of a student seeking an internship: The organization the student applied to requested to see her Facebook page, then instructed her which entries to delete. Is some boundary being crossed here? Should it be?

As a woman writer, will I pay an extra price when work and family mingle in public? Do I want family pictures, with children’s names and personal information, available on the Internet? What do I do about the college students I taught, who now want to “friend” me? Would they enjoy a funny snapshot of my dog Porschy fleeing the buzzing vacuum cleaner? Would the Pakistani colleagues?

The “whole world” may have been watching at sixties anti-war demonstrations, but back then it was usually possible to go home afterwards. Which face do I face the world with nowadays, when the scrutiny can be 24/7?

Meanwhile, my high school held a reunion. And yes, I got more Facebook requests.

Perhaps I should grow a separate set of names to greet the faces that I meet. Maybe avatars are the solution. I feel a twinge of atavism. I wonder if Currer, Acton, and Ellis are pseudonyms that can be taken.

While I’m still deciding, I’ve tweaked my privacy settings again. Don’t look for me on Facebook. If you do, you won’t find me …um … I hope.

We are living in some smoke today, but safe. The big Santa Cruz County wildfire you have probably seen on the news remains  miles off and over the ridge.  I know, because I can see it on the Internet.

I found this  link to a satellite  fire map via Twitter (posted under #lockheedfire).

http://wv.enplan.com/

The map, produced by an environmental planning company, shows the fire perimeters. Each of  the little flame icons marks a place where heat has been detected by satellites.

Thankfully, we are way to the east. With a bit of scrolling around, you might even see our house—but it’s way far off the screen with the fire.  Amazing technology.

During last year’s fire season, I had to scramble for fire information,  often searching the comments to news updates on the local paper’s website.  I still do that, but I also follow the fire on a handheld, using WIFI and the Twitter postings of our neighbors closer to the scene.

Thus I can tell friends and family with certainty that the fire is a long way off.  It’s about time!