Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,Cheers theme
Chris Saad has a great post about the personalisation of the web. It is a particular habit of old people to yearn for the “good old” days when you could walk into your local shop and be greeted by name. Or walk into your local pub and order your “usual” and even have it served in your own tankard. The good news for these people is that Web 3.0 promises not just to recreate this old world charm but also to surpass it.
One of the great things about reality is having a body. It’s the ultimate unique identifier. It’s also quite a handy social aggregator. Up until now we have really lacked a personal presence on the web. We’ve had the ability to create dispirate profiles but we’ve never had the chance to truly unify those profiles into a singular corporeal presence.
How will Web 3.0 surpass ye olde pub landlord?
The traditional pub landlord had to build up their knowledge about you over time. Bit by bit over the years they’d learn more and more about you. Web 3.0 promises to eliminate the need for this learning process. The minute you walk into the pub you will be able to share your entire history (drinking or otherwise). Before you even sit down the landlord will be pouring your favourite drink.
You’ll also have the chance to share your network of friends with the landlord as well. “Hi Charlie. Hey, your friend John came in last week and had a pint of Old Peculiar and really enjoyed it.” “Great. I’ll try one as well.”
You’ll also be able to share everything you’ve read or watched or listened to. The landlord will put country on the jukebox, sport on the TV and ask if you’d like a packet of pork scratchings having just read Animal Farm that week.
In the web 2.0 world we’ve become sick of introducing ourselves over and over to all the different landlords. I want to be able to go to any pub and for them to always know my name. For many of us the Facebook Arms has become our local. The landlord knows us, all our other friends are there as well. The Facebook Arms is happy for other businesses to come in and sell their wares to its customers as long as they don’t try take any of the information they get outside the pub.
I long for the day when I can drink at any pub. I’m sure I’ll still pop into the Facebook Arms for old times sake.
You can share basic personal information with a good pub landlord without worrying he’ll broadcast it. The more personal any relationship becomes, the more discretion is required. We make complicated decisions about what to share during every conversation. This requires emotional intelligence – the ability to predict the recipient’s reaction to the data being made public, as well as one’s own.
As a pub landlord, there may be occasions when sharing sensitive details is necessary for the benefit of the individual concerned, or perhaps even the other punters? There’s a difference between him sharing your whereabouts with one of your friends and with a stranger (or your spouse!). Either way, an understanding of what sharing might mean requires empathy, which we generally gain by virtue of having grown up as a fellow human.
Since real life relationships have a grey, fluid concept of privacy why wouldn’t we expect online life to eventually have the same?
Couldn’t agree more. Privacy and deciding what we do and don’t share is going to become more and more important. We have to trust websites to use our information responsibly as well. Websites which abuse our trust are going to lose customers just as quickly as a blabbermouth landlord.
On another point. I wonder whether any employers will start demanding that their employees be GPS locatable at any time of the day. This is already the case for many logistics workers who drive tagged vehicles.