3pointD.com

I like this post from Erin Banister, who runs the “virtual assistant” firm Trinity Jacobs:

Last night my niece came to me asking for some help with her MySpace page, and I couldn’t help but ask what drew her to MySpace to begin with. As I was fiddling around with her page, she delved into these intense relationships she’s developed with other people who have MySpace accounts (most of whom she knew in the ‘real world’ beforehand), the feeling of belonging (from having a bazillion ‘friends’), and just being able to post her feelings at any time. Mostly, she said, having a MySpace account makes her feel popular.

With a little help from Jeremiah Owyang, Erin goes on to consider what it means to have a younger generation coming up that’s being introduced to tools like blogging, social software and avatarized environments like MySpace at an early age.

Here’s how I put it at the end of the early-90s dot-com boom:

When the Commodore 64 came along, those of us old enough to read followed the instructions. But Dan and Mike are unburdened by such received wisdom. They are first-generation citizens of the information age, not immigrants to it, and are intuitively familiar with its language and its ways. We who remember the dawn of the personal computer may feel that the future has at long last arrived, but Dan and Mike were born into that future. It is nothing more exciting than their present day.

Erin again:

It is quite amazing, now that I think of it, how many of these kids are actively blogging, and becoming more and more technologically advanced than even I was as a kid (and I was a techno-geek, even then). We see people still scoffing at the Internet because of the dot-com bust of the late ’90s — and this new wave of people hardly recall what happened 7 years ago. We’re looking at the future of entrepreneurs — who have learned from our mistakes, and who are already blurring the line between the real and the virtual world. [Emphasis mine]

That’s the 3pointD generation. The convergence of virtual environments with the physical world around us is only just beginning. Those of us who are involved with these technologies now may have cool ideas about what can be done with such tools, but just wait until people like Erin’s niece get hold of them, people for whom VWs aren’t so much fascinating new toys as they are part and parcel of the world they live in. These aren’t just technological changes we’ll be seeing; it’ll be a whole new society, one that’s just as comfortable in a place like Second Life as they are in their office or living room. That’s when the real change will happen. All we can do is lay the groundwork, and try to make sure we do a good job of creating the right frameworks — whether technological, commercial, legal, social or otherwise — to foster that change. Because it won’t be too long now before the future is out of our hands.