In all aspects of our lives and around the world, we are seeing borders disappear, often with unpredictable and dramatic consequences and outcomes. Not just physical borders – though these are thinning too. Social, community, online/offline – all are now blurred, and we are jointly grappling with the communication challenges these changes bring.
Consider:
Technology has essentially erased the border that at one time, for most people, separated work from non-work time. You worked in a factory, or a farm, or a bank, or a theater, the day ended and you went home – work was done, the rest of life was underway. Today, work and life bleed together all the time, mostly in the unwanted direction of work taking up personal time, but sometimes in the other direction, as in ordering a movie online at work, or exchanging IM or email with a loved one.
At the same time, the border that previously existed between the online and offline worlds also has become diffuse. As virtual reality becomes more immersive, what people experience in front of their computers or other input devices can become as “real” as that in the flesh and blood world. I experienced this early on in my gaming career after a particularly long and immersive weekend of Doom – I walked down the hall at work and looked at a painting and thought, “hmm, I bet if I push here, it will open up a passage.” No, I didn’t push, but it did give me pause (and cause me to go cold turkey on Doom). People looking to connect today experience that blur between online and offline. Now, when I travel, I have an out of office email message that says I’ll be slow on mail, sometimes it says I’m on vacation, sometimes it says I’m traveling on business. When I get where I’m going, I update my IM to reflect location – FXS is in Orlando, San Francisco, NYC. My presence on Facebook changes regularly simply because it can – having breakfast, getting ready for an event, wishing for rain. My blog updates, people read it, have a sense of where I am/what I’m doing. Even when not connected, those virtual cues I’ve left behind signal both my presence and my location in a way that was not even conceivable just five years ago. For me, and I think for many, we live in a constant gray area between the online and offline worlds – semi-online? Offline except for sms messages on the phone, and the digital trail of where I am/have been?
Borders and identification solidly in the real world are blurred as well. And not just via things like the ability to travel so easily through EU countries. At two conferences in the last month, I’ve watched people identify themselves first by the company they worked for, and only then by where they were from in the world. And even those same companies increasingly are only loosely moored to geographic labels – in a global economy is Dassault a French company? IBM an American company? If a U.S. port is being managed by a company headquartered in Dubai but listed on the London stock exchange, what is the tag we’d put on the whole mess? Citizens and companies of the world indeed.
The impact of technology can be especially seen in the way we look at/define community. For many years, community was found where people lived/worked, the border between a city or town, or neighborhood or school district. Friends existed in the real world. Today, “friends” on Facebook or MySpace can be friends in the true sense of the word in the real world, or they can be business associates or people you might have bumped into once at a conference or school. As many others have noted, sometimes our closest and tightest relationships are with those in the virtual community and not in the real community – the best example is the incredibly tight connection often found in the clans operating in World of Warcraft. Virtual reality or no, the community is real.
Still, we’re in early days. As I’ve noted before, we’re all struggling to find the right analog between the real and virtual in the way we want to communicate and be communicated to. If I accept that my personal and professional lives are increasingly blurred and connected, what are the modes of communication I want to receive? It’s not a philosophical question, it’s one that anyone in communication should be consumed with. We already have more data and more ways to communicate in a focused way than at any time in history. Are we using these new tools to fine tune the way we reach people, or are we using a blunt instrument still? What we are about to see is going to make the arguments about “opt out” and “opt in” look puny by comparison – when the online/offline/personal/business lives converge, I think people are going to be even more cranky about the next version of spam. Of course, the upside is huge. If I chose to geographically identify myself (where I am) and what mode I’m in (working/playing), then the way I want to be communicated (or let’s just call it marketed) to is pretty clear – and should be a win for marketers and marketees alike.
So, on this front, color me optimistic. But the world has a way of pushing back, and I can’t help but notice the rise of neo-tribalism, where people associate so strongly with those from their physical tribe that all else ceases to matter. Hello, Iraq, hello Lebanon, hello London, hello Kosovo. In each of these places, the tribe wins – the immediate, physical tribe, not the community writ large and made possible via technology. Years ago, when I was working with McDonald’s, there was a saying that there had never been a war between two counties who both had McD franchises, a rule proved wrong in Panama and again in the conflicts in both Serbia and Lebanon, but I think the larger point is still valid and at least semi-hopeful – if a country is developed enough to have fast food, they will be less likely to engage in territorial disputes. In the same way, my hope is that the rise of neo-community will someday dwarf the rise of neo-tribalism, to the end that we’ll look back at the physical world disputes and wonder what the deal was, after all. Is there a tie between broadband penetration, computer access and societal violence? Someone smarter than me will figure it out, I’m sure – just name the rule after me – the fxs rule of broadband and tribalism.