I have made posts in the past about this age being comparable to the Renaissance, and this is a series of thoughts I will share about where I think we are today, and of course it has something to do with where mobile technology is playing a role in a world rapidly advancing toward the future.

Look at our age.  It represents some unique characteristics:

o    The power of presence
o    An era of immediacy
o    A sense of strangers

This list supports a concept, that being that the impact of mobile technologies on humanity today is as relevant as inventions like movable type, the color palette, or artists and creators whose timeless impact on our lives is still being contemplated, reassessed, and measured.

The internet, when combined with the PC has given us a small taste of what a new form of presence means.  You can place yourself firmly in new and other circles with these mediums and tools. How often have you felt the itch of Facebook, MySpace, or sensed the audience of your Twitter following ?  When do you check in ?  Why do you care about these circles of friends, colleagues, strangers ?

This all has to do with the power of presence in an age of ubiquitous computing.  You have more reach than you ever had before. You can project yourself, your opinion, the obscure elements and happenings of your life in to a global audience of people and organizations and it is unlike any other time or place in our past, as you have been unable to conduct such practices so broadly and quickly.

Look at how effortlessly communication and contact happens in this age of immediacy.  IP is everywhere, data is simply pervasive, and everything is near real time.  We have already started to devalue those processes and procedures in our life that are not real time.  The very concept of standing in a cue or a line, or in taking time to learn a process for interaction with others is viewed as dated, and a legacy age of interaction.

I am a personality type that appreciates the stranger.  I am not so sure we are the majority, there may not be too many of us. I meet just as many people that either hide behind the facade of niceties or resist any engagement in deep or revealing thought with a stranger.  It’s relatively easy to pick up the baton of business practice, or to use the need for a professional network to overcome the challenges that exist for some in this area. In this day and age, whatever chalk line existed between personal and professional life is blurring, and getting rapidly stamped out by technology and the expectations of friends, colleagues, and family.

You have more reach than you ever had before, and so do they.  Our entire definition, concept, and sense of a stranger is rapidly changing.

Here I sit, with my mobile in hand, glaring at the flaws that I would like to fix in the experiences I have with these objects and the services and connections that they provide.  However, I cannot get over some overriding facts, a half-step-back-in-time sense of awareness.

I roam everywhere.  When I do, I have 5-7 points of presence active in a device in my pocket. It tends to be how I judge the capability of a valuable product in this age. I am connected with people in my life that I barely know as much or more so than the people who I know and cherish the most.  At times, people who I met at some limited environment, or past point in my life, are reaching out to me.  I am followed, I follow them, and collectively we participate in a more or less universal dialectic about what we are listening to, what we are reading, or who and what touched us at near real time and no matter where we are on this globe.

Tell me this is not a Renaissance and that we have done any thing more than scratch the surface of a fascinating new world where the potential impact on humanity is just now being envisaged and understood.  Your PC never touched you the way this technology and these concepts will.  The Internet alone never had this much of a chance of impacting your life.  The mobile experiences and way of life is a unique catalyst in this way. Every day we need to be thinking about how much we are willing to change, and to adapt to embrace these moments.  This is a chance to live and work in a way that rewards and enriches us and is unlike any other that we have been presented with before.

In my opinion it is definitely one of those times in history where the overriding theme is that humanity will never look back, and if we do, it will be to view this time as a golden age.

// Lee