Introducing Lucaso, our newest columnist...
It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new columnist for SVW, Lucaso, a pseudonym for a young 28 year old writer/geek, who brings us a taste of his world.
He brings us a taste of a generation, a group, a Northern West Coast culture, found in San Francisco and northwards, through Portland and up to Seattle and Vancouver.
I'm interested in how the groups in our increasingly fractured society talk, what they think about, how they communicate, and how they pursue happiness.
The more I look at what is happening as a result of the emerging media technologies, I am increasingly convinced our near-future will result in less knowledge of each other's worlds. We will live in societies in which we inhabit the same geographic location but inhabit totally different online/offline worlds.
We already see that trend in the rise of the gated communities of homes in the real world, and the same is happening online and in our job and social networks.
Our direct exepreince of our society's diversity increasingly narrows as our media technologies improve.
We spend more time at work, the future is Always On. And so we see the same people, same economic class, same type of intellect, most of the time. The reason we think we live in a small world is that we do--we rareley venture out of our groups, professional and otherwise.
It's an increasingly Snowcrash world, a 1992 novel that I think about a lot these days, nearly everyday. Because it pointed to things that are coming into being in this emerging Internet 2.0 world. Among those things in Snowcrash, is the many different groups living in sharply different cultures right next to each other, and mostly oblivious to each other.
I think the communications gaps between our society's groups will increase in the future, especially as we begin to withdraw into semi-public conversations.
But, we have choices and we don't have to listen, or preach to the same choir, we can listen to other voices too. And that's what SVW hopes to bring you more frequently than before...
Take a look at the adjoining post, Loco Luco by our newest and youngest columnist, Lucaso.
