A New Label

Perfectly echoing my sentiments, Dieter Rappold recently stated in an interview that he perceives the Web 2.0 phenomenon not as a technical one, but more as a cultural shift in behavior. In my personal opinion, this cultural shift hails from new possibilities and the desire to use those to create something impossible until recently.

Communication is important to us in many ways. It help our prehistoric predecessors coordinating in the daily hunt and similarly continues to do so to the modern day. It is our most important tool in educating the next generation, and evolving our culture. And  it is essential for the individual to define itself to the outside and to learn and evolve on a personal level. 

Communication isn’t limited to words. Communication constitutes of such obvious things as speech and writing, more indirect ones like music and performances, and such abstracts as the timing or lack of communication. There are myriad ways of communication and as Watzlawik put it so precisely: You can not not communicate. 

We have literally spent aeons with the ways we communicated. Until very recently. In the last few decades, the advent of mass computerization hailed limitless new ways of communication for the masses. Still, those ways are not yet entirely defined. In our attempt to do so, we look at those ways we already know. To name just a few, we reinvent letters with email,  conversations with IM’s, radio with podcasts, tv with youtube, phones with skype, neighborhood relations with facebook and gossip with twitter.

All those new methods are similar, but rarely the same as their predecessors. They are the same idea, re-imagined with new possibilities. We are now at the beginning of all this. Sometimes in the future (probably sooner then later) this forms of communication will evolve until they can adequately supplement or even replace those methods we used the last few millennia.

In its original meaning, the term kinship refers to blood relation. Still, kinship is something that can evolve between any group of people. With those new methods of communication, kinship (and its use in satisfying the deepest human need to ‘not be alone’) suddenly arises between groups of people who never actually, physically met. It even leads to marriages (to grasp the magnitude of this, watch those videos: Did You Know, Iran: A Nation of Bloggers).

So I guess, one day there will be ways of online communication adequate enough for the participants to live through the bondings and experiences of life without physical representation. To decide if this is to be wished for or feared, will remain our own responsibility.

BTW, there is a term for those who embrace those new methods: Depending if you are either grew up with it, or where to old to grow up with it and later decided to participate, you are either labeled a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant (for more, see the following presentation: Enterprise 2.0). These are hardly adequate terms, for the Web 2.0 is no ‘country’ with natives or immigrants, but the terms are once more borrowed from concepts we knew already.