Let's peer into the near future. It's the Year 2040, 35 years after the social networking revolution began. How has human behavior changed? Just how blurred are the boundaries between public and private persona? How much do we share? And, how will this impact on the way we build relationships and find information?
These were just some of the questions analyzed at Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp 2010 (held on June 26). Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. It’s described as a birds-of-a-feather session, where smart people get together to discuss technology issues.
Attendee Jodee Rich suggests that the Foo Camp group be called Sotropians, modelled after Xtropians -- people who speculate about the evolution of human beings augmented by social networks.
The panel explored the premise that openness will be ubiquitous by 2040 – when the debate will no longer be private vs. public, but instead public vs. broadcast. Borrowing on the idea of Extropianism, the group introduced Sotropianism, reflecting a concept where social networking and social behavior improve the human condition in many ways.
This includes: greater connectedness leading individuals to become less judgmental; the availability of public profiles and data which will accelerate relationship building; degrees of separation will be narrowed from 6 to 3; markerters will have less control of their brand; geographic boundaries becoming transparent, and virtual villages will rapidly evolve and decline around issues. We can all tap into the collective stream of consciousness to enhance how we learn, shop, do business and make decisions.
Some of the panel speakers included Brian Solis, Deanna Zandt, Mark Pesce, along with Jodee.
Foo Camp people are those who work in fields such as mobile, big data, cloud computing, open government, gaming, open source programming, computer security, hardware hacking and merging technology fields.