The Net is breaking over the world and nothing seems more obvious than that it will further erode the relevance of geography in human relations. Everybody in cyberspace is a few keystrokes from everyone else; the canonical six degrees of separation seem more like two.
For most of the last decade, my Net correspondence, like most, has been with people I met over the Net and know only through their Net personae. But over the last year, as the proportion of people with Net access has grown, more of the activity in my mailbox has been dominated by people I knew or know primarily from the offline world: friends, family, classmates, neighbors. I think of these as my "physical," as opposed to "virtual," online correspondents.
As the Net has grown, my mailbox, like everyone's, has been handling more and more activity. Something has had to give, and what has given, in general, has been my virtual correspondence. E-mail that evokes a physical encounter, with all its sensory modalities and loss of control (you can't monkey with the colors of a physical person, scroll back through their conversations, or make their voice louder or softer - at least it would be impolite to try) reaches out and grabs me in a way that messages from a virtual correspondent do not. Further, messages by virtual posters tend to be defined by subjects; messages sent by a physical person tend to be organized around relationships, around personal issues. Often these seem more urgent, or at least more interesting.
At present, only a tiny fraction of my physical friends and relations are on the Net, but in the near future most of them will be here, together with mailing lists running out of all the neighborhood associations to which I belong: reading groups, discussion groups, vocational and political societies, alumni organizations, church groups. I don't doubt that in time every family will have its own mailing list carrying contributions from its members. At that point - actually long before it - we will have to triage our mail still further. While I have had to do very little of this so far, I sense that the rules will be something like this: friends over strangers; family over friends; and within those categories, the geographically or chronologically close over the distant. Those most likely to survive the second cut are longtime friends who live nearby. Messages from someone I am likely to meet physically in the near future have the highest priority of all (among social relations).
Recently, I read about a software developer who has six continuous teleconferencing sessions running all day, every day, in windows scattered around the margins of his terminal. The people in these sessions aren't even project colleagues - just friends he likes to banter with while he works. Eventually bandwidth will get cheap enough to allow almost all Net users to do something like this, and if they do, my experience suggests it will be longtime, local friends who will end up on their displays.
Until now, each successive generation in the 20th century has spread its time and energy among larger and larger numbers of people. Our great-grandparents might have known a few thousand people over their lives; most of us have spent at least a few hours with many tens of thousands. This is another way of describing the collapse of local cultures and the development of the world monoculture. It is possible, against all expectations, that the Net will reverse this trend, allowing us to spend more and more time with a smaller and smaller number of people. If so, local cultures might in time reemerge from the world monoculture.
