Do you know your neighbors? The general consensus over the last 30 years has been the American family and by extension American communities have been in a state of degradation.
However, with the rise of Web 2.0, social networks and media, we maybe seeing the rebirth of the American sense of community. For years now, sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have allow us to connect online with friends, family, colleagues and other people with whom we share a common interest or bond.
More recently, however with the arise of location based services and sites like FourSquare we not only know when are ‘friends,’ ‘fans,’ and ‘followers’ are online, we know WHERE they are online.
Despite the obvious security concerns, this is an extremely powerful convergence of technology which could revolutionize the way we view and interact within and across communities.
Imagine the possibilities, the technology would automatically recognize when your friends or colleagues were in your general vicinity. Affording you the opportunity to connect and extend our virtual social networking interactions into the real world in real-time.
If a friend was “in the neighborhood,” not only would you have the advance warning necessary to get really quiet and turn off all of the lights [never would I do this]; you could actually be social and actually invite them over. Extended to the business arena, this could be a powerful networking and logistics tool. Simple discovery of where resources and individuals are located in real time has been the holy grail of logistics and MICROmanagement since before the pyramids were planned.
Don’t get me wrong however, there are some very serious privacy and security concerns when considering the abuse of such technology. Under centralized or compromised control, such a network would be akin to Big Brother and as such would have to be completely voluntary. But with careful and targeted use this often isolating and disjointed world of internet technologies could actually start to bring us together physically in ways in which were never possible before.
