One of the central benefits touted by network proponents in the early days of the Internet was the idea that we could be at any place, at anytime from anywhere, usually accompanied by one-hit wonder Jesus Jones’ ‘Right Here, Right Now’ playing in the background.
Fast forward 15 years.
None of these promises came true. In the intervening decade and a half, everything went sideways, sliding on a thick layer of Internet grease. Most of us still gird ourselves for morning commutes. The smiling, racially-diverse video conferences envisioned in 1997 kinda-sorta-work if by video you mean jerky, pixelated, postage-stamp sized vidBUFFERING…BUFFERING…BUFFERING, and more often than not, meetings involve booking a flight and packing a bag. Jesus Jones continues to collect royalty cheques from telecommunication behemoths.
Somewhere along the way, something interesting happened: the Internet itself has become a ‘place’. Not a place in the discrete sense like William Gibson’s cyberspace or the colour-graded Matrix of the Wachowski Brothers, but more as an adjunct to corporeal life. We Facebook, blog, tweet, record, photograph, and film our everyday lives and upload, tag, comment, and share our lives like never before. There’s no reason to bore people with vacation photos after the trip: I can bore them in real-time. We don’t live online, but the metadata of our lives resides there and augments and connects us like the warp and weft of a giant social tapestry.
And this is why I’m in the middle of the desert to take a look at the online looms and carpet weavers: Blogworld Expo 2010 (Blogworld) in Las Vegas. But what drives people to actually attend such a conference and deal with connecting flights, lost luggage, McCarran’s interminably long taxi lineup, or an army of gaudy Elvis impersonators? Even then, having travelled to Las Vegas, the paradox of Blogworld is that the people who attend will probably spend a large portion of their time online. I constantly saw attendees, who had presumably spent considerable time and money to be present, illuminated by the pale-blue glow of their requisite MacBook Pros or de rigueur iPhone, Blackberry, or Droid smartphones. I recall one specific party (hosted by Montreal’s Tungle and starring keynote speaker Scott Stratten of Unmarketing fame) where a knot of attendees, drinks in one hand, heads bowed and thumbs clicking like devote Catholics seeking penance through the Rosary. No doubt they were texting and tweeting each other: the irony is not lost on me.
Ostensibly the exact same information presented in the conference rooms and tradeshow floor could be found online, for free, without the need to be present. Take away the conference tracks (which are available online) and the sales and marketing people (myself included) at the tradeshow booths (which are available online to through individual vendor websites), and the parties (which are no doubt available online through Facebook photos, videos, and assorted drunken tweets), what is the draw? The answer is ‘the people’, but not in the ‘it’s the people, stupid’ way. Social media is more about people and personalities—the social—and less about YouTube videos, Flickr photos, or canned Keynote slide media.
The acceleration in communication technology has vastly outstripped our capability as people to relate: remember, 150 years ago the telegraph was the closest thing we had to the Internet. Against this deluge of impersonal technology we find ourselves trying to humanize our interactions, to ‘keep it real’ in the literal, not figurative sense. A video projection on your laptop is never as good as seeing a speaker in person; a blog post is no match for a good coffee shop expository (or, more likely, rant); a tweet is a poor substitute for a quick one-liner in an elevator.
Blogworld is about meeting the people we follow online and connecting with them in a tangible way. You can’t shake hands with a mouse, and all the LOLs in the world don’t equal a single real laugh in good company. Our online networks connect us, and introduce us to new people both near and far, and those connections are nurtured and maintained by our collective online activities, but the tipping point is the flash of recognition where a 1-inch tall profile picture becomes a living, breathing, person standing across from you. And despite what the Las Vegas tourism board proclaims, that meeting doesn’t stay in Vegas–now you can read their blog or follow them on Twitter or pick up the phone and call them: from anywhere at anytime.
We may spend time online, but we live in the real world. Similarly, we know people online, but we have friends in the real world. So, in the desert we meet.
[Next: notes from AffinityClick from the Blogworld tradeshow floor]
