Christopher Poole (Moot) Plans To Shape Physical Communities

Mal Fletcher

Posted on: Tuesday 26 October 2010

In a recent appearance at the TED conference in the US, 4chan founder Christopher (moot) Poole talked about the origins of his groundbreaking website. He also gave a glimpse into his possible professional future.

When asked what he sees himself doing in ten years time, he responded by saying that he’d gone back to school and is considering a major in urban studies and urban design.

He’d like, he added, to take ‘whatever I’ve learned from online communities and try to adapt that to physical communities.’

This is an interesting idea and one that I believe will exercise the minds of a great many more of his generation in the next few years.

It’s an important idea for several reasons. Firstly because online communication, cyber-talk, is forever changing the way we connect and interface.

Psychologists talk now about ‘absent presence’, where people sit packed closely together in a room without any face-to-face connection, because they’re busy talking via PDAs to people who’re miles away.

Studies are being conducted into constant partial attention. Young people are showing signs of being less well equipped to form complex arguments, or to present ideas in longer forms, because they’re heavily reliant on sound-byte driven, multi-tasking media.

Meanwhile, of course, we marvel at the positive possibilities that are opening up with the development of technologies like those within the Microsoft’s Kinnect platform, based on the Natal project.

This and other packages like it will enable us to employ Natural User Interfacing (NUI). Forget your mouse or pen tablet; you’ll soon be using your arms, legs, facial expressions, in fact all bodily movements to communicate direct with your PC (or its next generation offspring).

Avatarism and VR will soon allow us to travel virtually and to hold fully haptic virtual meetings, involving all of the human senses including smell. Virtual educators based on the likes of George Washington and Albert Einstein are already in advanced development in the US.

Virtual is replacing real in the nursing field, too. In Japan not long ago, one thousand aged care facilities purchased Paro robots, which are designed to help people who suffer from such problems as dementia. In a recent study, the majority of patients in those facilities said that they prefer the robots to human nurses.

With all this technology the potential for either benefit or loss in terms of the human experience is huge. As always, the future will not be shaped by technology, but by human responses to it, by how we adapt it – or are adapted to it.

In one way or another, online community building will become more and more a part of physical community building. An understanding of one will add much to our understanding of the other.

Yet the other significant thing about young Mr. Poole’s plan is that it shows a mind that’s aware of the distinction between cyber and physical environments.

It might be easy to confuse the two if one’s entire life was for a time defined by the building and maintenance of a mega-popular website. (4Chan draws something like seven million viewers per week.)

As technologies lean more toward the NUI idea, extending the Wii game experience into almost every area of life, it becomes easy to think of the human-machine interface taking over from the human-human one.

Yet human beings are and will always be social beings. How we express that social nature will change over time, but as physical beings occupying physical space, we will continue to relate in hands-on ways.

That’s partly because we’re wired that way: lock someone in a room on their own for long enough and they’ll go a little potty.

However, it’s also because we’ll have to get along in physical environments to survive.

If the global population balloons to nine billion before 2050, as most experts believe it will, we’ll have no choice but to find better ways to get along in the real world, as much as in the cyber variety.

With the release of The Social Network movie, many have commented on the irony that sees a socially awkward man giving us the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook.

At a time when so much of the social side of net technology is being driven by seeming social misfits, I’m heartened to know that at least one young mover and shaker understands how important physical communities are and will continue to be.

And that he’s willing to engage in building a better physical world, instead of assuming it’s all going to happen online.


Q: What part does social networking play in your life & how will it impact real-time communities in the next 10 years? I'd love your comments (below)...