whereness

Nowadays, thanks to the web, we can be in more than one place at one time – sustaining multiple dialogues/ presence simultaneously.

I watched an intense conversation on Twitter the other day, between two people who had quite different concepts of whereness.

“Jack” believed that his whereness depended exclusively on his current physical location/ geography, whereas “Jill” believed that her whereness at any moment was simply a function of her current connectivity/ point(s) of engagement.

For sure, for a variety of political, economic and commercial reasons, the earth is not yet a completely level playing field. But it is a lot flatter than it used to be and that means that many of us have developed very different personal allegiances since the popularisation of the web.

For many people this is a natural state of affairs and they have no qualms about steadily extending their reach into new realms of transglobal conversation; others though still cling to the comfortable metaphor of the physical world, even when using advanced communications technology to smash geographical boundaries.

Quite simply I believe that  ”where I’m at” always describes a state of mind (or whereness) coupled to various communitities, mostly of like-minded individuals.

For me, this state of whereness bears little allegiance to the physical globe, which for centuries has been a very powerful mental model instilled into generations of children to give them an understanding of where they ‘fit’ into the world.

As a psychological construct, I am not sure that the traditional globe will fulfil that role for much longer, as successive generations inherit peer-to-peer communications as their natural way of life.

Perhaps our sense of whereness needs a new abstraction to replace the globe with a new map that reflects our ‘place’ in the world more appropriately.

Here is  such an example:

Picture credit: anne helmond

Of course the physical globe  [for all intents and purposes] does not share the dynamic fluidity of the online world – but I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of man to devise a dynamic mapping function to help us navigate our way through the ever-changing online world. Indeed this is probably a fairly trivial task for a competent programmer.

Such dynamic whereness maps would also help us to manage effectively the challenges of our nowness!