I had an interesting lunchtime discussion with several colleagues yesterday about the extent to which we “live” online. Here’s a sampling of the participants:

Colleague 1: A graphic designer who uses e-mail only sparingly, doesn’t have or want a computer at home, won’t purchase anything online, and doesn’t consider the web a viable place to find information.

Colleague 2: A recruiter for a creative agency who spends a good part of his week on the phone and in meetings with both potential candidates and current talent. He also uses instant messaging to keep in touch with those candidates and the web to find new prospects. He listens to podcasts and reads blogs from time to time but hadn’t heard of RSS and liked my suggestion of using a tool (RSS reader) that would help him to read more blogs more efficiently.

Me: An unabashed advocate of social media and a regular online junkie. Holding down a job, paying bills, buying books, planning trips, reading the news, sharing photos, exchanging ideas, keeping in touch with family and friends around the country and the world that I don’t/can’t see regularly in person, making appointments for the “offline” world, consulting, blogging, reading blogs, podcasting, listening to podcasts, helping to organize an unconference, taking classes, chatting, and making new acquaintances and friends all require, or are enriched, by way of an Internet connection.

‘Web 2.0-only life’

Yet Technology Review’s James Fallows clearly blows me out of the water with his two-week journalistic experiment of “living a Web 2.0-only life.” Fallows uses a full range of online tools — from the more obvious ones, such as Flickr, Gmail, and Skype to the less well-known, such as iOutliner and Zillow — to manage all of his everyday activities and responsibilities, except (presumably) eating, sleeping, showering, and … uhm … kissing his wife :)

Among Fallows’s insights:

  • The new web is both analog — an evolutionary “continuum of new ideas” — and digital — it works better with “yes-or-no signals” than with “nuanced judgments”
  • The new web inspires us to create, share, and innovate, but also requires a certain level of trust and a ceding of even more of our privacy
  • Online-only tools have their limitations. A word-processing application such as Writely works brilliantly … as long as we’re not on an airplane and without an Internet connection. Hand-held devices such as PDAs and cellphones are good for reading and sending e-mails, but limiting when it comes time for accessing Web 2.0 applications
  • Ajax is a key component of Web 2.0, one that is doing wonders to enhance the online user experience

It’s a good and thoughtful read that illustrates how new media tools are weaving their way through our lives … for some of us, at least!

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