I sat down this morning with my cup of coffee and rather aimlessly checked out my Twitter account, and then switched to the HASTAC feed.   It was astonishing to see how many people were tweeting and retweeting different aspects of what we do.  Some were focusing on our forum on race, some were extolling our innovative Drupal-powered website, some were talking about the Digital Media and Learning Competition, some anticipating our upcoming bookclub on Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, some retweeting my tweet about the Macmillan v. Amazon Kindle face-off, some interested in issues of labor and temp workers in the digital age.   It felt like the promise of 2002, when we founded HASTAC, had come to fruition.  We really have become the intellectual network node of the moment, a switching point for all kinds of people interested in all of technology's "affordances" from creative and open source design to the social and political power of technology in society.

Of course that's gratifying but it also made me ask the question, "Is innovation sometimes too innovative?"  In 2002, when we began HASTAC, people could not understand what we were up to at all.   Was it about IT, ways of getting better technology into our classrooms?  Was it about digital humanities or humanities computing, ways of animating and digitizing the amazing archives of culture?   Was it about digital divide?   Well, yes, yes, yes, and so much more.  Technology is all of that, and so is HASTAC.  But, mostly, it is insisting that to think technology is only for scientists is to shortchange scientists--and the rest of us too!   That is, to take something as monumental as the Information Age, and think it is only the province of computational scientists, is to ignore how pervasive is the Web's and Internet's influence over all the aspects of our life, over how we communicate and interact locally and globally, and, ultimately, of what it means to be human.  

And, of course, if you are asking questions like that, rather than the humanities being peripheral, they are crucial.   The Information Age is way too big not to be one of the foundational concerns of the long-tradition of the humanities as well as a focus of computational and natural scientists, social scientists, and artists too.  Duh.  That seems pretty obvious in 2010.  Judging by my Twitter stream this morning, HASTAC (which has been saying this over and over since 2002) is finally being heard.  We are suddenly the cat's pajamas (even if these pj's are now over eight years old). 

The point is a great and highly innovative ideas are not really ahead of their time, they are catalysts in their time.    HASTAC was ahead of the game, which means we were on the sidelines.  Now that the game is everywhere, now that people see what we've been seeing, the key is how to keep this all going.   For that is the other twist in innovation:  you can be the visionary crying the future in the dessert with hardly anyone listening.  That's a frustrating position to be in but it's actually pretty easy.  What happens when your message is the message everyone needs to hear, now?  How do you keep THAT going?

Speaking of Twitter, I was in a taxi with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, less than three years ago.  He served as a judge for our first Digital Media and Learning Competition and, judging by the timeline I just referred to on Wikipedia, he was in the midst of some pretty major decisions about the future of Twitter as we were driving from the judging room to a party at the home of the President of the MacArthur Foundation.  One topic of conversation was how "Twttr" went to "Twitter" and whether it really would "catch on."   Another was how SXSW had used Twitter so effectively a few weeks before and now everyone in the Internet innovation community was talking about it--or tweeting about it, and it was mushrooming faster and more furiously than anyone could have imagined.   It's been amazing to watch Twitter grow and grow, and to recall that conversation with the genuinely fabulous (kind and so smart) Evan.  

Is HASTAC having its Twitter moment?  Well, our metric is thousands not millions, not billions, but we're all volunteers here, so it's starting to feel a bit intense.   No question the HASTAC Scholars not only understand the HASTAC vision, they are growing it, pushing it, pulling it, leading the way.   That's exactly as it should be.

Bear with us as we catch up to what we predicted eight years ago, back in those days when folks thought we were all a little crazy.  Please expect hiccups and growing pains as we fit ourselves into the vision of constantly expanding re-vision that we crafted eight innovative years ago.   Guess what?  We are loving this ride.