We are developing new senses that not only allow us to learn and change with a greater capacity than ever before, but to network and interact for business and pleasure on an entirely different scale. These are senses that can change our standard of living, improve our overall quality of life, even help us think in ways that weren’t possible before.
Online social senses can be thought of as a capacity to perceive what happens in online spaces. They are needed to explore and perceive these worlds, and to enable us to interact in these worlds, reply and react to what’s going on. So just like hearing and sight, we develop a digital kinesthesia as we try to find a position in each of the opportunities the online world affords.
How we learn to navigate online communities is important to understand because it is having an increasing impact on the information input we experience. It is, in simplest terms, a huge sensory input. People who are active users of Facebook find that it as a significant impact on their daily lives. Keeping pace and knowing what’s going on with hundreds of connected “friends” and their conversations is an example of digital kinesthesia.
One important difference between physical reality and online reality is that we have different personalities online that aren’t synthesized, which means we have multiple identities to consider in time and space. But don’t think of this as a negative, but as a positive, even if at first it feels overwhelming and scattered because it’s not fused in a single being. We have multiple identities as we travel through online world having different experiences, different things to react to, with no single, static environment.
This experience of divergent identities is not a single experience. In the physical world, the limitations of geography means a person creates a relationship with the environment and people that by definition is constrained by those limits. Seldom do you get to touch more than a couple of people at a time, for example.
In comparison, our multiple identities share experiences with other online identities that are vastly different. We interact with tens, hundreds, thousands of people at a time. This makes these shared experiences fundamentally different.
Our digital projections (online identities) will only become richer and richer, representing our will, desires, and nature at a higher degree of expansiveness, not to mention accuracy.
The simple activity of creating connections in the online world of social networks creates intersections, overlapping shared experiences with other identities. These intersections are sensory input.
Online agents will also enhance our ability to engage. With increasing degrees of machine autonomy in decision making, we will only get more informational input, and choices, over time.
With more and more machine to machine communication, as our mobile networks grow, we will be able to enhance our human endeavors in new ways. We will, for example, be able to have long distance relationships that have immediacy and persistence. We are already starting to, but it will only feel more and more like we’re in the same time and space, regardless of physical location.
With social networks, we are building digital projections of our selves are part of a universe that really has no boundaries. You, therefore, have no boundaries in your ability. You can reconsider your ambition entirely.
