digital familiars

Nice classic youtube take-off on websites, done by JLT people with a nice timepass idea, time to kill, and and good feel for the net.

Makes you think, though.

Websites. Are. People.

Websites have personality, we talk to them every day, they know us and we know them. 88% of americans consider the internet an important part of their lives. IIT students in India were so continuously online the administration had to forcibly disconnect them to prevent social skill atrophy.

And I'm not talking about net porn or work. We are online more and more, for more and more, spending more and more time, sacrificing more and more alternatives without even being aware of them.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing either. Being online automatically ups your IQ by fifty points, as far as the e-world is concerned. It's the first step towards true hive-mindship, cyberconsciousness... and we're heading for that like people, not borg, with all our idiosyncracies, megrims and vapours, neuroses, delusions and illusions, the works, the whole shebang.

And we're doing it not just all together, all nine billion of us, but with a whole new animal, inconcievable a couple of years back. Us, online. Our digital selves. Who we are, as described by our socnet profiles, the cookies in our browsers, the password files, avatars and nicks, our IP addresses. Our digital familiars in the age of cybermagic.

And along with us come all the others, AI, bots, the daemons and the sprites that we've made for company, which are not only becoming smarter and smarter, but are also picking up from us what it means to be alive - personality, preferences, idiosyncracies. The Turing Test is growing closer and closer to obsolescence. On Second Life, the difference is gone.

How long do you think it's going to be before the rest of the world follows?