Hi David
Time to move on. We've been playing with the idea of exploring the future together through open letters, for three months.
I haven't yet written a reply to the last open letter you posted but our paths have crossed several times since you wrote it. So this post is to tidy up our open letter experiment and bring in some conclusions from our recent meetings and conversations elsewhere.
Setting the scene
Let me set the scene for this post - probably the final post of the first stage of our journey into the future together. This was a three month experiment, which is now drawing to a close. We may choose to restart - and that would be a second experiment, growing out of the first. Or we may draw it to a complete close. Either way is fine.
I'm writing from memory (because I'll get drawn into a different level of detail if I go back and read what we wrote). If we do need to check for mismatches between my recollections and what we actually wrote we can check the archives later.
Archiving our lives
The possibility of checking the archives of our posts - and not normally allowing ourselves any exchange of ideas outside of that space - gives us access to a level of accurate recall usually denied us in other areas of life. The possibility (indeed the reality) of accurate recall is changing as we begin to find our way in this strange reality that is "the way we live our lives now".
Now - and our perceptions of it
What do I mean by "now"? I guess I mean the succession of days that I live in - days like today, December 19th 2011.
If I start to analyse today it is packed with things that used to belong "in the future". Such things arrive repeatedly - and with increasing rapidity. The future becomes the present on a daily basis. This quickly makes the recent past seem historic.
Our perceptions of time and distance are changing. I think that's been true since we first had enough photos and videos to enable us to see the same people captured at different points in time. We hear news of a celebrity death and then see that person as a young man in a tribute programme. We also have Skype and emails and messaging in real time and with gaps between. We need to plan considerately to take account of time zones. All these things affect our perceptions of ourselves in relation to time and space. That's another aspect of living in the future (the now-future) that I'd like to explore with you. Maybe we can travel in that direction together in the new year.
The experiment
Back to our three month experiment. When we started writing the idea was to explore the future together, to set out on a kind of journey. We got as far as you being impatient to start, me packing my bags ready for the journey and apologising for keeping you waiting, and you surprising me by saying you'd wait for me. I think that was mid November. I didn't expect to keep you waiting so long.
From my point of view this experiment emerged from various conversations we've had - especially one we had late one evening - probably early 2011 - when we played out the idea that were actually talking to each other at some point in the future and we were reminiscing about life "back in the twenty-tens". We were discussing what we should tell a child about our past (way back in the twenty-tens) and wondering what useful lessons, if any, there might be to bring from that distant way of life.
In my mind our open letters were approaching that conversation from the other end - starting now and moving forward to explore once again, from a different perspective the route between now and that future date.
Life and time travelling
I think much of life now is rather like time travelling.
Lots of films explore the idea of people going into a coma or some such and emerging years later - confused by the little details of life that others take for granted but were completely unknown in the person's previous conscious life. It's a familiar story, but what is changing now is the pace of the changes. You wouldn't have to be asleep for long to find that when you woke up, and tried to go about your previous normal routine, there were confusing changes that other people were taking for granted.
You and I already live in a "digital tech world" that we've come to take for granted (but would have been strangeto imagine when I was a child). I'm typing this on my laptop - if I stop to think of the digital technology embedded around me the list quickly grows - my central heating contols, the TV, radio, phone, microwave and other stuff in the kitchen for a start. Once I step out the door it explodes again - the surveillence cameras, the traffic light controls, the "hole in the wall' cash dispensers (and all my payments by debit card - the full electronic banking scene and online shopping), the shop doors opening for me automtically, the tills and stock control systems inside... Whatever would my granny have made of it all if she'd done a time travel and landed up here!
Living our lives in parallel but in different realities
I'm thinking now how people who are living alongside each other, but belonging to different generations, have grown up in dramatically different environments. Years ago (perhaps in the 80s and 90s) it was still quite a novelty for children to know better than adults how to manipulate the digital tech that was coming into peoples homes. Now it's just accepted by many people that with lots of things "It'll be easier to find out how that works when the children/grandchildren have got time to show me."
Even people of the same generation are separated from each others "reality" through their different relationships with "the tech" and the results of those relationships. Some of us see the world as being "much as before" but with different gadgets. Some of us see it as dramaticlly changing in all kinds of invisible ways as well. Sometimes it seems that many of us are living in different, parallel realities, close together in a physical sense but on completely different tracks, with complelety different views when we start to describe today's world and tomorrow's to each other.
Following in father's footsteps.
For people living in a rapidly changing "digital tech world" it's hard to imagine someone following in their father's footsteps the way that used to happen (and still can) in some "non digital tech world" scenarios.
I think of walking down a village street in Nigeria, with a friend from the village, and how we stopped to greet the blacksmith, who was busy working. The blacksmith's young son was there. He seemed hardly more than a toddler in my eyes, but perhaps he was primary school age. As soon as he saw us he stepped in front of his father, facing us as his father was, with the same stance. His father had been working the bellows, and the boy took hold of them too, proudly adding his puny strength to the task of pumping the bellows as his father slackened in his own efforts while he talked to us.
I remember the child proudly catching my eye and grinning broadly as he stood there, being the mini-version of his dad. To me it seemed he was acting out the role that he expected to play as a man. I imagined that he knew he would be the blacksmith, just as his father was, and as his grandfather had probably been before that. I imagined the boy already knew what it would mean to take that role, needed by the community, respected by the people aound him for his skill and service. From his earliest days the boy was working-and-playing alongside his father and picking up the skills he would need as a man. No "digital tech" was involved, and it was easy to follow in the family footsteps, generation after generation.
Imagine taking one of today's children time-travelling back ten or twenty years - or going even furher back, so they arrived in a room where one of their parents was a child playing. What a contrast. As for time traveliing back to join their grandparents playing as children. That would be a very strange world. How different from the experience of the blacksmith's son if he time- travelled back to join his age-mate father or grandfather playing and working and very probably helping dad to pump the bellows.
In a rapidly changing digital tech world how can anyone imagine following in the work footsteps of parents or grandparents (or other close role models in that age-range) when, from the very start, the children's paths have been so different to the generation before? Of course there are exceptions - parents who are involved in some kind of creative and entrepreneurial endeavours for instance - and there can always be shared values and vision across the generations - but when it comes to the detail of living your life and earning your living - is there anyone to follow or is everyone a pioneer?
Heading into the future
If no-one has trodden the path before you then how do you find the way to go? The future is where we're headed (given our current limited skills regarding time travel or "living in the now" or achieving nirvana or any other alternative). For most of us the truth is simple - the future is where we are going (unless we die on the way). We don't know what it will look like, but chances are it's something we couldn't have imagined five, ten or twenty years ago and probably we can't imagine it now either.
So, can we get the future explored it in any way and prepare ourselves for the lives we will make there? Those are the kind of questions I wanted to explore with you in our open letters - and I have failed. I think there were two main reasons. One is to do with style and the other is to do with time. If we look at those two issues perhaps it will help us to decide if we start again on a "stage two" of this journey into the future togehter, or if we simply agree that it was worth giving it a go for three months but now enough is enough.
Style
I love the way you write, and I hoped I'd have time to enjoy responding to what you wrote not just in terms of content, but also influenced by your style. Each time I'd read your new post and tell myself that responding would be something that I'd do at the weekend in a leisurely way for enjoyment - but somehow there never seemed time for that kind of approach, and so it would get put off, and put off, until finally it got done in more of a hurry - just anyway that I could.
Finding the way
I wanted to explore ideas with you of what the future would look like (I think I still do).
I see it as a journey, and I don't want to make that journey alone. I want to travel with people I know and trust, people who will be able to make sense of what we find and understand where we seem to be going, preferably my friends - so you and I got started.
We seemed well suited for the endeavour. We've never done small talk, not even on our first meeting. In the hours we've spent together we've covered some unusual ground (including the future) and we've hit on insights that were new to one or both of us. I value the "thought journeys" that we've taken together.
What happened on this journey to the future via open letter blogs? Why didn't I set off with you as quickly as we expected? in my mind I think I know what happened - but I don't know if it will make sense to you. i'll just write it so it makes sense to me.
Reflections
I couldn't let go of the present for long enough to set out on our journey. I was too involved in what I was needing to do now.
I was creating a reality in my mind of this journey with you - and I was playing with the idea of who else would be with us. Although it was just the two of us setting out I felt that we would need to meet other people on our journey and link up with them. We aren't on some quest to a future with only two people in it. I knew we needed to connect up with others as soon as possible and couldn't decide how to enable our paths to cross and how it would work.
I allowed myself the idea that, in the future, we would have got better at pushing the boundaries of time and distance. I decided we'd be able to connect up with our friends and contacts in some "advanced Skype" way, so it wouldn't matter that they hadn't set out into the future with us - but it would be better if they had. And if we wanted serious long term collboration in this shared future then we'd really need some attangement for getting together face-to-face.
Reality
Meanwhile, as I was playing with these scenarios in my head time was passing in my real here-and-now world. Three months - the time for our first experiment in writing - is a long time when the future is rushing at us as quickly as it is.
I've been meeting more people who already see, with each passing day, that the future is arriving more strongly and the familiar ways and expectations they have been living with are being pushed into the past.
Finding people who might be interested is collaboraion is no longer an idea of how things will be. New collaborations are emerging, and I need to put time into them, so that there are practical outcomes.
There are other "new" people I need to get back to before too long, while the initial brief converstions and connections are still fresh and providing possible fertile gound for new ideas on collaboration.
There are many ways for people to be stronger together and to help each other achieve things in a shorter time and to gather sufficient resources. I'm trying to get better at having the conversations that lead to recognising overlapping interests, directions and appropriate actiion.
Getting it straight in my head
You know that I belong in the character type of "How do I know what I think til I hear what I say?" I need to have an "external entity" either requiring me to explain myself, or at least giving me permission or encouragemnt to do so. The entity may be a discussion list, or it may be an individual, or just a diary. It may be someone I write my thoughts to, or someone I explain things to in spoken words.
It helps if I belive that I am gathering my thoughts for someone who wants them, or at least has some kind of interest in them. Failing that it helps to have someone who cares enough for me and my sanity to give me a space to take my thoughts and ideas out of my head - where they erupt, tumble, race, collide and cascade - and put them into some kind of order before allowing them back in.
Maybe you and I don't need to set out from the shore, sailing to the deeper waters together. Maybe, since the last blog you posted, the tide has been coming in faster than we realised and we're already in much deeper water than we were at the start - and it's not just the two of us here. But as long as I see streams of change all around us altering the vey ground we stand on I'll be thinking about it, and trying to see what patterns are emerging, and how we can be stronger together as we face the unknown
Maybe for the sake of my sanity I'll decide to keep writing open letters to you for another three months - and you can decide if you want to read them and reply.
Thanks for being wiht me this far.
Pam