The more elaborate the means of communication the less communication takes place.
You might think that the following is some kind of joke – a parody of the ‘constantly connected’, switched ontogether uber-wired. It’s not. I clipped the following from gigaom.
we’re seeing now that apps are looking to build a momentary community out of people who just happen to be in one very specific place at the same time. By helping you see the people around you and giving you ways to communicate and connect, it’s taking social networking from online into instant offline relationships that can end at that location or can continue on in some form.
We used to call these ‘serendipitous social connections’ parties – places we would drift to from the pub on the basis of a nod and ‘bring a bottle’. We’d talk to people we barely knew. That was the whole point. We’d gatecrash on the basis of being a distant friend of, was it Sam or Geoff …?, a bottle of something, and a demeanour that signalled we weren’t likely to trash the place. Now it’s more likely that the claim to be a friend of … would be immediately checked by scanning the social graph of umpteen online social networks.
Even that is being superceded by ‘apps’ which find the gates and open them for you. So with Karizma (a name to conjour with if ever there was one)
users can instantly video chat and meet people who are currently geographically close. They can extend their existing social graph (Facebook connect, Twitter, address books) with precisely selected connections based on their age, interests, language and proximity.
If you don’t want to see the face of whoever it is you might want to talk to, you could of course keep it a wee bit more ‘simple’ by using sonar.me
Sonar makes it easy to message people in the room with a simple click.
Wow! How about that.
Of course, you can find out who is geographically close not by, God forbid, scanning the horizen with your eyes, but by ‘checking in’ (real life is some kind of hotel according to this metaphor) with Foursquare, which allows those with mobile phones and the inclination, to log their locations with a central service and share that information with others – friends, friends of friend’s friends etc. So once Foursquare tells us that X is nearby we could … use Sonar to text them or Karizma to have a video chat with them. Which is about as charismatic as chatroulette.
You couldn’t make these things up. Only someone did and others financed them to ‘bring it to market’. As long as they don’t bring it to a party anywhere near me.