Wilkesboro Blur
Originally uploaded by vincenthorn.
Last night, I was trying to explain what “Web 2.0” is to a dear friend, who although fairly tech savvy, is just now starting to explore the world of crazy web 2.0 apps. I showed him Zaadz, Ma.Gnolia, Google Calendar, and some others, and the profundity of Web 2.0, especially in regards to human relationships started to strike me.
You see, Web 2.0 has deeply impacted my relationships. I belong to a sort of collective virtual community that is made up of blogs, social networks, shared bookmarking services, RSS Readers, and much more. The net impact is that I’m deeply connected to what’s happening with the group of people I know and share interests with. I know because I’m reading their blog, because they’re commenting on mine, because I’m reading the same things they are, etc. It’s as if we’re all in a constant dialogue that usually has nothing to do with one-on-one discussion (although that is included at times too). And it isn’t just with one, or two, or even three people, but with dozens!
In a sense I feel like it’s the beginning of a small collective organism. Like systems in the body we’re each connected in near simultaneity (especially for those of us who are always online). When one person (or node or sub-system or whatever analogy we want to use) becomes aware of something, like a new web-service, story, etc. all of the other people in the collective come into “the know” almost immediately as that information ripples outwards into the collectively wired system/organism.
And what makes this a real organism (or the beginnings of one) is that after that ripple goes out, there are new ripples that respond immediately from the other nodes. The system is constantly responding to itself, taking relevant information from the outside, communicating that information to the rest of the system, and then seeing an immediate response (in the form of comments, new tags, podcasts, blog posts, etc.) from the other nodes in a process of constant mutual response and learning.
The collective is held together by mutual trust, shared interests, and similar communication mediums (in this case web 1.0 & 2.0). The outside consists of everything that we’re in contact with outside of this network (Google News, other blogs, etc.). But the cool thing, which just occurred to me, is that the outside for one node is the inside for another. One node’s deep interests and trust networks can be different, with a kind of overlapping occurring. In this way one node is simultaneously part of several collective organisms, and so there emerges in the virtual (and non-virtual) world an overlapping, inter-penetrating, collective of collectives all informing and being responded to by each individual collective and individual node, all in near-real-time with a powerful medium that is only becoming more powerful each day.
And to bring this abstract vision back down to earth—where it ultimately belongs—I have an example of how this virtual collective has profoundly impacted my local connections. I have a few very close friends who also live in Boulder that are part of my social collective network. In virtual space we are reading each others blogs, sending each other bookmarks, aggregating similar reading material, and sharing other material. When we get together in person to chat we don’t have to catch up, share what we’ve been reading, etc. We just jump right in at a hyper-speed level and begin where the virtual world left off—with the beautiful addition of being able to connect in the more heartfelt and personable ways that web 2.0 simply can’t capture (yet). The conversations we then have as we’re able to weave together all of these different threads of interest, experience, and thought become the manure, motivation, inspiration for new virtual proliferations (such as this one). This proliferation, which is nothing more than an expression of what most of us have already been considering and talking about, then becomes an added piece to an already emerging puzzle.
And all of this begs the question, what exactly is emerging and where is it all heading?
