BigShinyThing

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people …

All copy from Cluster.

For a nice overview of the ‘new reality’ of online youth, check out a recent interview between MIT’s Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. We’ve reported before on boyd’s view that social media sites function as ‘digital publics’ where young people — whose freedoms are heavily constrained in the physical world — can live more freely, via media ‘in which’ (and, crucially, ‘where’, these media being conceptualised and experienced as places) they feel completely ‘at home’.

So — the kids have a new ‘place’ to play. What’s the difference between MySpace and all the other places where generations of young people have hung out to get a bit of freedom — the park, the mall, the video arcade? Maybe the clue is in this quote from Jenkins:

Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks.

Bows and arrows, yes, but fast forward: during the Industrial Revolution, very few children played with live steam and drop forges. During the Atom Age and Cold War, kids never got hands-on with Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactions. But in the Information Age, they’ve got Access All Areas to the most culturally-transformative technologies of our time, and a fluency with them that comes only to digital natives. Children being children, they’ve been getting busy with these toys — people don’t grok where their kids are at because the kids have left the building. They’ve gone. Nobody noticed, while a whole generation bootstrapped itself up and out — offworld, into media-which-is-a-place, where they’re forging a new reality: a vibrant pop culture mashup of late consumerism and virtuality-enabled persona-hacking. And it’s in their world, not ours, that they’re going to learn, invent and grow up. We’ve lost them. Off into elseware. Gone.

Until childhood’s end: we tip 2015-2020 as the period when the grown-up children of this new world start to port their way of being back into our world, enacting their society, their way.

Expect a revolution.

There’s always been a real division between the physical and online worlds: if you’re sitting in front of a screen, you have only a window into the virtual. Likewise, others online have only limited access to your physical presence, be that through email, IM, webcam — there’s a chokepoint where reality, fantasy and interface bandwidth intersect. Cue much theorising about the ‘cyborg identity construct’ and ‘life on the screen’ in 1990s media theory. As the cultural theorists contended — and the current explosion of MMORPGs proves — there’s much identity-morphing fun to had: today’s digital natives are as comfortable engineering their online personæ as they are changing the ringtone on the latest Nokia.

But there’s a downside to these loose connections between physical and virtual. Think for example of an art gallery. It occupies physical space, and if you’re present there, you can interact with both the artworks and the other people present. The gallery probably also has an online presence, but if you’re online, you don’t generally have any meaningful way to interact with what’s going on in the physical gallery, and vice versa. The two worlds don’t connect.

There have been a few attempts to bridge the void between worlds, and to build hybrid social media, where the physical and the virtual grade one into the other — witness for example Radio One’s clunky integration of their One Big Weekend festival into current darling-of-the-digerati ‘life game’ Second Life. Nice try, but there’s still a gap between the worlds — the BBC concedes that “those attending the Second Life rock festival will not be able to see avatars of their favourite artists”, and likewise those getting down and muddy in the physical world won’t be able to mosh with those online who are experiencing “an authentic festival experience on a virtual mud-slide”. Ahem.

Clumsy indeed. However, tech-art projects (and cybersex technologies) aside, that’s as good a collapsing-together of the physical and virtual as we’ve seen. But as of this week, we suspect that’s all going to change. Why? Google, which has released SketchUp — a 3D design tool which enables punters to create objects and plunk them down in the world of Google Earth.

So what you say? Well, think ahead. Add avatars (currently missing from Google Earth), and suddenly you have a set of technologies that start to close the gap between physical and virtual. Consider the enablers: Google Search knows about stuff. All kinds of stuff. And where it is, who knows about it, what it does. Google Earth knows about physical space. And with the addition of SketchUp, Google enables people to add models of physical-world-things into an easy-to-use representation of that space. And we already have rumours that Google is working on GPS navigation tools.

Glue this all together: imagine Google Earth 2.0 as a Second Life-style virtuality, but using real world maps. If you have a Google navigation-enabled mobile device, your online avatar can follow you around the physical world. Location-sensitive advertising? Check. Interaction between people visiting a site online and people in the related physical location (via IM, VoIP etc)? Check. Possibilities for augmented reality gaming and marketing? Oh yes. We’re seeing the possibility here of Google enabling a whole new augmented media landscape, with a new language of spatial isomorphism between physical and virtual worlds. One step closer, but to what? Stay tuned.

[via Business 2.0]