The early days of the internet were like ham radio: a few keen operators who communicated with each other more or less alone in the network. The web stage saw newcomers who actively reached out to each other, building networks. The third stage was a general, off-line population who joined the networks out of curiosity and interest, generally seeking fun. The fourth stage was the capitalisation of said networks; the fifth was the commercial trawl for new users. The sixth was about pushing: consolidating the gold rush, locking users into systems that complimented and became essential to their everyday real-world lives. Everything since then has been competition -- first for "eyeballs", then the remainder of the virtual body.
You don't need to go online to find things now. Now, things find
you. People look for you, corporations look for you, products want you to work with them. The new frontier has become the crowded mall, the jammed city. The community is a crowd, the group is a mob.
In theory we could avoid this by going off-line, but in reality that's as practical as disconnecting the plumbing.
So the next stage, I propose will be the stranger in the crowd phase. We know we're out there, we know we're in a public space, we know everything we do online is visible to someone at some point in time. So we'll put up the same front that we do when we're crossing a busy street: yes, this is me, but it's not the
real me.
And we won't go online to interact. We'll go online just to
be online, knowing that we'll be confronted by in-your-face bots and channels and real people, all of them pan-handling -- because going online is as natural as crossing the street.
But we won't be going online to
do anything. We'll simply be online because we have to be there. Having an online presence will become as passive as that phrase. We'll just be there in the crowd. And sometimes you'll find money on the sidewalk, and sometimes strangers' eyes will meet. But mostly it will be crowded and noisy and not carry much meaning beyond the space itself.
Welcome to the rush hour: the strangers in the crowd phase. We're all in Shibuya now.