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GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED CONVERSATIONS
The Internet is about “Globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations.”1 Transcending boundaries is built into the web. What walls do you want to break down?
The fact that we can read firsthand the tweets and blog posts of bloggers in Iran or China, and can read the tweets and Facebook updates of people involved in the Arab Spring is revolutionary. We have never had this capacity before. Sure the telephone connected people around the world and television brings pictures from afar, but this is different. This is mass but it is also in our control, it is personal, it is asynchronous and distributed all at the same time. It allows us to experience the world as joined up as never before. We are all becoming more aware that actions cause reactions. You might find that you have more in common with someone on the other side of the world than with the person in the house next door.
So we can cross geographical and political boundaries with relative ease for the first time, but inside organizations there are still significant boundaries keeping us apart. People separate themselves by department, by status, or by role. It is not easy to instigate a conversation between people in different silos within the same organizations. Even if you are in the same, or related, parts of the business you are often physically separated – either by being in a different building or even in a different corner of a large open plan office. You can be ...
