We're fast approaching a time when it's normal to be always connected, always on. Indeed for some, eg: teens, it's becoming almost anti-social to not be able to be reached at any time. We're getting to the point where we're living parts of our lives 'online' and seamlessly and unconsciously dipping in and out.
Pagers, followed quickly by mobile phones, were the first big step towards this blurring and they're becoming ever more central to daily life. Texting has evolved beyond being a means of communicating a message, to be something akin to a sort of virtual 'touch'. It's still too early to say how the next wave of mobile will affect society, but it's guaranteed to push blurring even further.
Online chat, and especially IM, have also been a big driver of blurring, and more recently social networking / community sites like MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, et al have been another big step. People are using these sites as a kind of virtual 'room' where they can store their stuff, show off, congregate with their friends, etc. Unlike the first incarnation of personal homepages (geocities/tripod/angelfire etc), MySpace-ilk pages are dynamic, easy to update, intuitive to use, and intrinsically social in flavour.
[Sidenote: most of the hype in this currently focuses on MySpace and Facebook, as they're the biggest. But things change really fast, and all it takes is a few influential folk to decide to leave MySpace and switch to an upstart service and lots of their friends follow. There's also a question about to what extent these sites will be linked to real- life geography and communities. Facebook limited by college/school; others like CyWorld (Korea) and Playahead (Scandinavia) have limited by region. Others are limited but inadvertantly - eg: Orkut aimed to be a community of geeks, but instead turned into the MySpace / social networking site for Brazil! ]
The next generation of community sites is likely to be 3D, places such as SecondLife, and this represents an enormous step forward in terms of the way in which people will be able to relate and interact. Whereas before you could visit a website at the same time to watch a webcast together, and be in touch throughout via IM... in the next generation of communities you can 'physically' be together via your avatars at a concert, not only talking but holding hands, dancing.
So far, I've focused on the social aspects of blurring, but of course it's much broader than that. Increasingly people are doing functional things online too, carrying out daily chores. Online banking, shopping, online photo albums, online bookmarks, reading news online and so on are all examples of the blurring line between real and virtual places.
One final point: some people talk about real space (or meatspace to use a particularly hideous term for it) and virtual space as if they are different things. For kids who've grown up with the Internet and mobiles, they're not. Stuff that happens online is just as important and 'real' as stuff that happens offline. To them it's all the same thing, in the same way that telephone conversations and face-to-face conversations are related. (Actually the telephone is an interesting analogy... when telephones were first invented, many people were put off by them, thinking the phone conversations somehow weren't 'real' either!)
Some other slides:
More info and thoughts that i've not yet put into slides:
“My Space is just so big, everyone is now on board, people are using in like the telephone, not have a My Space page is a signal of social ineptitude” - link
“It’s a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever” - from the New Yorker, May 15 2006 (page 55)
“The UK-orientated Faceparty, started six years ago, predates MySpace but until recently was largely unreported in the serious press. According to Hitwise, it has more than 6m subscribers (rising by 35,000 a week) and was the number one community site in the UK in the first quarter. “ – The Guardian, June 1 2006
I was told that Playahead has 1.2m subs between 14-30, representing 90% of youth market in Sweden. Still need to verify this though, but believe it as the guy who told me is usually well informed about this kind of stuff.
I was told by someone else that Cyworld has 12 million members, 3.8 bn weekly page impressions, and that 90% of 24-29 yr olds in Korea have their own 'mini-hompy' which is like the equivalent of a myspace page. Still need to dig around to verify this.
"Lunarstorm, a Swedish social networking website, is reported to have attracted more than 80% of 12- to 24-year-olds in that country" - link
“There is a group of Amazonians in Second Life,” Vogels said, “and we are building a bridge between Amazon Web services and Second Life so you can go into Second Life and actually try things on there and buy them. There are people who want to use Amazon as a platform to buy and sell things in Second Life.” - via 3pointd in March 2006
"Tringo," a cross between "Tetris" and bingo, was created by New Zealander Nathan Keir in "Second Life," an online game where players have much freedom to create virtual objects with complex workings. The game is now being distributed by Crave Entertainment as "GBA Tringo" for the Game Boy Advance portable game player, making the jump from the virtual world to the real one - via cnn in april 2006
Some extracts from this great article :
"Tools such as e-mail and instant messaging may have been around since the dawn of the internet era, but it has taken a wireless communications revolution to turn them into a constant and inescapable fact of life for a growing part of the population... For those in the grip of these new networks, life has changed. There’s no such thing as solitude any more, no fragment of time that cannot be filled with digital chatter".
"Most technologies, as they reach a bigger sphere of people, become less widely used. That has not been the case with mobile phones. The amount of time the average person spends with his or her mobile is going up even as the network expands".
"The virtual world is no longer behind a TV screen or on the PC: it’s with you all the time. The persistent chatter and, increasingly, the songs or TV shows being streamed over these networks are starting to seep into many aspects of everyday life"
"What Kenichi Fujimoto, a researcher at Keio University in Japan, calls the “schoolgirl pager revolution” remains one of the most revealing technology events of recent years. Simple numeric pages, designed for business use, were taken up in the early 1990s by teenage girls, who used them to send coded messages to each other. That became one of the models for the short text messaging that now seems to define youth culture. It was a seminal moment for the technology industry, a sign that the forces of technological innovation had been turned on their head. New technologies had always been created for business use first, on the assumption that employers would be prepared to pay for gadgets that made their workers more productive. That was how the first brick-like mobile phones got their start. Now, though, it is consumers - often teenagers - who are the early adopters of many new technologies. The rest of us follow their lead".
"Mobile networks are creating a new form of “full-time intimacy”.... The very nature of much of the mobile texting that goes on suggests that its real intention is to act as social glue, maintaining intimate connections between people: as a glance at any teenager’s stream of text messages shows, it is seldom to communicate meaningful information...This persistent, low-level form of contact is really all about maintaining a sense of constant “presence” with people who are elsewhere. The virtual world created by the mobile is a shared social space, something always with you: the point is to be always on and always connected, even if right now you have nothing much to say...The seemingly pointless short text message is “a sigh or smile or glance, a way of entering somebody’s virtual peripheral vision”. It may not lead to a conversation, but it is a way of maintaining contact.... Of course, there are new social obligations that come with all of this. There is an expectation that intimates should be “available for communication unless they are sleeping or working”.... Japanese teenagers say that messages have to be returned immediately, or at least within 30 minutes, or a social convention has been violated. Forgetting to take your mobile with you or letting the battery die are considered among the greatest of social misdemeanours.... Before dialling someone’s telephone number or in the run-up to a face-to-face meeting, a stream of text messages lays the ground"