blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

Hung out in Second Life tonight with a few friends – thanks Aram for the invite, that was very interesting and inspiring.

During the discussion, Joachim Stein said something very interesting: that the introduction of space brings chance back into the digital world. Think about it: you can hardly e-mail anyone by chance, yet you can meet someone in the street because you happen to walk down the same street. You don’t have to have adresses or locators because your bodies share the same physical space and distances are varying. The same paradigm is being re-introduced in SL where you can quasi-physically bump into people by serendipity. Same might go for the introduction of information into physical space. When we are traceable in space, our informational personas suddenly get assigned a location and might miss each other by just a few meters (could proximity over time become a decisive factor when judging a relationship between users?).

I’m finding this particularly intriguing since it is very close to what I tried with time in Blinks & Buttons – using the informational traces of space and time to introduce links between people through serendipity.