The space between us

So in the last post I spoke about my online body and how it compares to my offline one. But a body cannot exist in vacuum. It is a tool we use to interact with our environment and other bodies around us. So there are two realities to go with the whole concept of online and offline bodies. These realities are the laws that govern the abilities that the bodies can have. My 'real' body can run at a certain speed, it can shout at a certain volume. If I am in place A and you are in place B, and I cannot shout from A to B, I cannot communicate with you unless I come find you. (forget phones for the moment, that's cheating!). So the 'real' world is limited. And these limitations govern the interactions, and the decisions we make. The limitations are the problems we struggle to solve. In fact, the limitations bring out the creativity in us, how we work around the constraints of our environment and the shortcomings of our bodies is a major source of inspiration, even if only by necessity.

If you thought I would say that the online world is UNlimited, you have been misled. The online world is also limited, albeit differently. We may have the ability to contact anyone, and we may have the ability to cover vast distances but the bandwidth we have through which to communicate is very small. If our needs are covered by language, that is fine. Perhaps even video communication can be used through web cams. Additionally, we can have asynchronous modes of group communication through forums etc that have little parallel in the offline world. So the online world is a world where the balance of easy/difficult is different than the 'real' world. The simple ability to touch someone is impossible. We cannot even transfer the smallest object through the online channels we have at our disposal.

If these worlds are different then, and our social structures have been built for the offline world, my question is, shouldn't we be more imaginative in the structures we explore online? Until now, a number of new modes of communication have been explored from forums, to social news sites, to micro-blogging services. And we still have a long way to go. My feeling is that we have a lot more to discover in this field and a lot of surprises await us there.

However I have one more surprise for you. I may have spent most of this post convincing you that these worlds are different, but it was only to make a point. In fact, separating these worlds is a fool's errand. What happens online affects what happens offline and vice versa. We are the same people and each one of us is a pin that connects the two worlds together. Technologies like mobile phones, social networks etc. make this connection perfectly explicit. It may be possible to lead two different lives in these two worlds, but most of us chose not to but rather opt to combine the worlds and use the one to overcome the limitations of the other. So I may use chat to speak to someone important to me that is away now. Or I may meet someone online but sooner or later I will want to meet them offline.

In the future we may even use something like a contact lens to see online items in the offline world. Imagine going to your favourite coffee place and seeing an electronic note from one of your friends. Or going to town on Saturday morning and instantly knowing exactly where your friends are. The worlds will only come closer until they have perfectly merged into one.

This makes the challenge much more important. Once we find the social patterns we can form online, the next question is to see how they can be combined with the real world and what the social patterns that will form in the combined world could be. This is my motivation for wanting to study social computing, if anyone wanted to know.