The internet is not a “virtual world”. It is this world and it’s time you wrapped your head around it.
There was a time when you could dismiss the internet as some geeky flight of fancy. Then people started to make billions of dollars and you took notice. Didn’t you? I did.
There was a time when you could dismiss the internet as a thing “my kids use”. But then your mother “friended” you on Facebook and you wondered if this was bigger than you thought. Didn’t you? I did.
There was a time when you could dismiss the internet as “the virtual world”. Friends, if this is what you believe, you are the one in the “virtual world”.
The internet has become an integral part the world that we live in. Friends and lovers meet here. Cultures and communities are spawned here. Commerce, law and justice are being served here. This is not in parallel to everything else … this is completely integrated with everything else.
Do my words have less meaning by posting them here than they would if I said them to your face? They would if you had no way to respond. You would have no way to challenge my thinking in a medium that doesn’t foster discussion. There would be no way to expand on these ideas, or even offer a simple acknowledgment to me that you understand. Your only option would be to turn me off or avert your eyes. That’s not communication, that’s a monologue. You can respond by leaving a comment, or emailing me, Tweeting me, Facebooking me, what ever you want to do. The point is, you can respond. That my friend, is communication.
The word communication is rooted in the same word as community. I hope you agree that the best communities are democratic ones where everyone gets a voice.
If you are reading this you are likely in marketing, PR or some sort of “communications” industry. Maybe it’s time we consider ourselves to be in the “communities” industry.
The longer you continue down the path of denial, circumvention, deflection and other dismissive behaviours, the longer you will be living in your own virtual world. It’s that world that sounds like a layer away from reality to me, not the planet Earth that we currently live on.
Do you have a Twitter account? If not, how do you expect to come up with a Twitter program for your clients? If you are a client … how will you be able to judge the validity of the plan? Would you be able to come up with a solid TV plan if you’d never watched television? The notion is ridiculous to even conceive. Yet, we witness this behaviour every day in this space. It really doesn’t matter if you are reading this blog and others, I don’t care if you have read all the books in the world. They are just words. Meaning in this world, digital or otherwise, can only be achieved by participation. Experience is the only route to credibility and confidence in any subject matter.
We are in the midst of a cultural and economical reboot. Isn’t it time you considered your own skills set might need a little reboot too? This is not a lengthy intellectual pursuit we’re talking about here. This is something you can do right now. It’s tangible, it’s real and it’s time you got started.
Change is hard to take. Think of the last 1o years and seriously consider the human achievement that is Wikipedia: The largest encyclopedia in the history of our world. Yet, only around 50 people work there. Or at YouTube, where they’re currently hosting more videos than NBC, CBS and ABC have ever broadcast combined, built in a garage by three twenty-somethings. When will you begin to realize this shift is not going away? Change is not only inevitable for the future, it has already happened.
The choice is yours. Will you begin or will you allow yourself to be alienated in a world that was?
Tweet This!
Print This Post
7 Responses to “Feeling alienated in the virtual world?”
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
March 18th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Still claiming web as “the virtual world”? Maybe you’re the one in the “virtual world” http://bit.ly/ahKm9
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
March 20th, 2009 at 11:52 am
@jaffejuice Aren’t you getting tired of the term virtual?can we remove layer & call all this part of the actual world http://bit.ly/ahKm9 ?
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
March 20th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
radical trust: Feeling alienated in the virtual world?: The internet is not a “virtual world”. It is.. http://tinyurl.com/dmr3pw
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
March 20th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
If @jaffejuice were as smart as @collindouma he would have written this instead of this:
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3i781c3e0a48f6c1c28c8684899749ce3d
March 20th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I may not be as smart as @CollinDouma but hopefully I make up for it in enthusiasm and passion
March 20th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Awesome post and something I’ve been also saying, though not as eloquently. http://is.gd/ocWp
March 20th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Read your post and love what you wrote tho’ still think “virtual” (or whatever we call it) is separate to digital