I had a dream the other night where I encountered someone from the future. I’m not sure if they had come back to the past, or if I had somehow traveled 100 years into the future, but it was a very interesting encounter. Somehow I was able to know what she was thinking even while I was struggling to communicate with her. Let me try to explain. In this future, people seem to be melded completely with their social “software”. Instead of having a single set of experiences, she was almost in a “fractured” state. Part of her attention was on countless many things – playing some sort of interactive game with other people, expressing different personas to other people “online” at the same time, as well as her whole experience was somehow a “game”. What I mean by that was that every interaction she was having was going to result in some sort of status change for her. Either she was going to gain financially, socially, or acquire some virtual item. It was weird, almost as if you took Facebook and Twitter to their logical conclusion and they became part of her personality and constant interaction. Whatever aspect of this person that was in the “here and now” was somewhat puzzled by me, because I was not communicating with her on hundreds of different levels simultaneously. Meaning, small games – challenges – information queries, etc etc. Almost like she had all kinds of different “feelers” out via the internet and not meeting with any kind of response from me. There was not any sign of any sort of “rig” attached to her, but I somehow knew (this was a dream, after all) that she had some kind of cybernetic implant that allowed her to just think about someone or something and immediately connect with that person or “persona”.
What struck me about this dream was that it seemed as if all the kinds of activity one does on the internet now – facebook chat, poking, playing net games, sharing virtual items, etc etc were no longer just these things you did while on the computer, they had become internalized and were as natural as breathing to this person. On one hand, her attention was divided amongst hundreds of different activities, but on the other it was more like an orchestra. She was a very peculiar person, because she was bemused by my lack of “online presence” as if I were some kind of barbarian, but on the other hand she was on different levels seeking ways to use this information to her advantage. She was in constant communication with other “personas” – I cant really call them people, because they were also fractional aspects of other online personalities. It was like seeing a person through a crystal – all kinds of sub images.
Anyway, apart from just the novel-ness of the dream, I wanted to blog about this to get you thinking about what we are all doing on the net on a daily basis. Do you ever feel less “real” when you are offline? Like you are somehow a bit less of “yourself”? Have you ever had to be offline for a day or more and you felt an almost physical need to be online? I wonder if this is something that will grow more and more real as the years progress and we become more dependent on technology, as well as the lines between ourselves and our tools blurs even more.
