Folks who aren't on facebook
So, will folks who aren't on facebook, aren't on twitter, aren't on second life soon lose their communities offline as well as the offline contextual information flows dry up?
Where now we talk in the hallways, around the watercooler, at the pub, over lunch, will we only update our status in net-land and expect everyone to know that our cat died this morning?
What will the world be like for those outside of these networks?
Will the unnetwork world gradually experience a drop in high quality status chatter like the post office is seeing themselves lose volume as personal communications switch over to email? The post office is making it up by charging magazines a fortune, driving many out of business, further shrinking the bandwidth of culture and context that flows to offliners.
Will these analog refugees stumble around in a world where all the information flows that used to take place person to person now take place in these proprietary networks?
Will it be like not knowing the language of the country you are in? (You can see the obvious things, and catch your bus on time but you lose the subtext and plot.)
Will we have translation services to port culture back to the non-cyber backwaters? See Time and newsweek and half the infotainment shows on tv for what this might look like.
I think it may be too late for those who are not online to keep offline culture from becoming constantly more arid (barring major electrical shortages in the next decade) so we must so it may be left to those of us who are online to make sure that the culture of the new frontier stays free and can always be ported back to the non-cyber world. One of the biggest things we must do for ourselves and on behalf of those not online is fight to keep online content free, public, and unowned rather than allowing our cultural rivers to flow through enemy territory.