Virtuosity

I've been thinking quite a bit about the concepts of virtualization and abstraction over the past several months. Fundamentally, I've centered around the following question: Has humankind has begun the most significant migration in our history? Step outside your box for a second and consider the possibility that what we know now as reality may be in the process of changing at its very core. To start, let's ponder the parallels in the following two concepts...

Geostraction
It's no revelation that we live in a world increasingly abstracted from time and space. The pop-culture pre-realityshow fascination of a few years back, of watching people's entire lives fold out over a webcam turned out as just one example pointing to a much larger phenomenon: in the first half of this decade we've seen a massive move to "geostraction." WiFi hotspots, cellular phones, laptop computers, global communities make location an increasingly less relevant factor every day. Instant global electronic communication provides the framework for what's next.

Phystraction (the big whatif)
Considering our migration away from physical location and space, it's no surprise what we've seen happening virtually everywhere. Major market opps in the last 5 years have been all but defined by the migration of products, solutions, and corporations from physical to virtual space. From electronic marketplaces (eBay).... communities (MySpace, Facebook)... communication (email, IM, txt)... media (audio, image, video)... education (Blackboard, WebCT)... literature (Google)... recreation (WoW, xBox Live)... and relationships (Match) more segments of our lives go "live" every day. Business as usual? Think again. Consider the changes in technology in just the last couple years alone. The new playground, hang-out, or meet-up is imminently virtual. Precisely the virtualization that the negative media hype regarding isolated MySpace instances misses, is exactly what has (and will) drive both profits and people for many next generations to come. Naysayers, you miss the point... "the times they are a changing" plays out across all generations.

The crux of what I'm entertaining here are the possibilities and outcome of our ongoing migration of our lives from physical to virtual space. In science fiction the typical story is that humankind will someday fall unwilling victim to all-powerful machines (ala: Matrix, Borg, etc) that threaten to extract the very core of humanity, assimilate us into a cold collective intelligence matrix, then toss out our bodies as superfluous byproducts. Yet what if the virtualization of humanity has has already begun, just willingly, not forcibly? People from "my" generation (GenX) talk a lot about keeping their lives private and offline. People in newer gens are all but obsessed with uploading keeping their lives public and online. Good or bad is irrelevant, the question is this:

What if the uploading of our life experiences are little more than a start down an evolution into something entirely new and different than the what, who, and where we are now?

That's right, I'm talking Lawnmower Man style here - is uploading evolution? Good or bad, it seems we get closer every day. So at that broader level, the question remains: What do you think lies waiting for us as a humanity beyond the NextBigThing?

Evolution happens.
What's next?