Bridging the Online-Offline Gap

There’s a great line by comedian Louis CK when he was on Conan last year: “Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.” It’s a brilliant and hilarious rant about how technology has changed our lives and people don’t realize or appreciate it, check it:

Another great line: “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago” about the guy who complains about the Internet breaking on the plane.

It gets me thinking about how technology has changed my life, and how my offline and online worlds are increasingly colliding. As we integrate new technologies into our lives, it’s amazing how quickly we forget that we once had a life without it.

Remember life before the Internt? I guess I do, but not really. And people younger than me definitely don’t. My dad introduced me to Usenet in about 1990 (I was 9), and then shortly thereafter we got onto CompuServe. From there I discovered chatrooms (which taught me how to type), and from there I discovered IRC. I learned how to build computers because I found out you could play multiplayer Doom if you had 2 PCs — so I took apart and upgraded an older machine we had. Then I learned how empowering the Internet could be because when I had questions about PC building and networking I could find answers on newsgroups or by asking people in IRC chatrooms. In 1995 my dad came home from a business trip and brought me my very first issue of Wired:

For Christmas I naturally asked for my own subscription! Looking at the headlines on the cover are making me laugh right now: Interactive media: who needs it?, Neal Stephenson, and questioning traditional encyclopedias. These are conversations we’re still having.

Fast forward to today and I don’t see the distinction I once had between my offline and online lives. When I was a kid I didn’t really tell people that I was spending copious amounts of time in chatrooms. Now? My Twitter handle is on my business card. (And yes, Twitter is just one big chatroom, 100 million people strong.) In other words, Twitter isn’t a deviant thing I do by myself when nobody else is around like the chatrooms of yore. In fact, I’ve started meeting my “Twitter friends” in real-life, converting them to “real friends.” But in truth I don’t make the distinction between “Twitter” and “real” friends. They’re just friends, or contacts or people I know. Online or off? Who cares. It’s just the world, it’s just people–there is no online-offline gap as it relates to relationships.

And I love how the next wave of social media, location-aware services, are further bridging that online-offline gap. Google Maps has long given physical locations an online footprint, but something so silly as “checking-in” with your phone at a restaurant actually takes that footprint and gives it a leg or two. It connects an actual person to a real location, and produces a kind of digital shadow of what transpired. And this will only continue. Maybe not as Foursquare or Gowalla in their current forms, but this real-time linkage between people, places, and their corresponding online profiles, will only continue. If you can innovate in that stack, you may well have a legitimate business idea.

I admit that it’s polarizing. If you tell 10 people about Foursquare, most of them will shriek in horror. Why would you want to do that? I recently watched Marc Andreessen’s lengthy Q&A session at Stanford (worthwhile if you have the time) and he made the point that he loves to invest in polarizing technologies, stuff that 80% of people shriek in horror at, but that 20% of people become completely obsessed with. That reminded me of Facebook when it first arrived on the scene–many of my friends absolutely refused to join, saying it was creepy and weird. They said the same thing about Twitter a year ago. And now that’s the consensus around location-aware apps.

The more technology changes our lives, and the more we don’t realize it, the more we bridge the online-offline gap. I have ongoing conversations with people via Twitter, that move fluidly to in-person, to phone, to SMS, to email, to chat, to Facebook. Most of this was impossible a very short time ago, yet I take it for granted, it feels like it’s always been here. And that’s because I don’t consider the communication platform when I’m communicating. Online or offline? It’s just communication.