The really interesting shift occurred as we drifted back to what we’d been doing before we started chatting, leaving the audio channel open as we’d did so. We could hear each other typing. One of my daughters entered the room and spoke to me. Joi heard her and said hello. They had a brief conversation, their first since she was a little girl. Joi and I returned our e-mail. I wanted to set up an account on Technorati and broke in to ask him how to do it. He walked me through the process. There were other occasional interjections. I could hear the sounds of construction going on in his house.
For a long time, it was as though we were working in the same room, each of us alone with his endeavors and yet… together. Though half a world away.
This feels significant to me. Even over shorter distances, people rarely think of phone calls as being so casually cheap that one would simply leave the connection open for ambient telepresence and occasional conversation. To create shared spaces that span the planet, and to do so whenever you feel like it, and to leave them unpurposefully in place for hours, is not something people have done very often before.
Eventually, Joi had to leave to attend to other business his distant part of Meatspace. We collapsed our huge virtual room into nothing.
I went out on my balcony. In the snowy garden below, I watched a deer chase a huge raccoon into the bushes.