An interesting series of thoughts on Anil Dash's weblog today — what's the net social impact of a shift from location-focused addresses to person-focused addresses?
I know a significant number of people who initiated business relationships with people they met while on hold as the phone was being passed, in contexts that we'd now call "loose ties". And that's not to mention romantic couples who met this way, resulting in everything from flings to marriages. I'd suspect all of us know at least one person whose parents met by accident because communication in the past was typically to a place before it was to a person. It's gradually gotten less centralized, of course; Few of us in the United States can remember party lines or going to a general store to get the mail.
So I lament the serendipity that's been lost. Many of the most interesting and exciting things that happen to us happen by chance, and now most of the time when I talk to someone, I do it by getting in touch with that specific person. There are of course the rare times when someone is using a computer that belongs to another person and that entry on my buddy list yields a surprise when I send a message. Or a few times I'll call a cell phone and it will have to get handed to its rightful owner before the conversation can begin. But those pass-through moments used to be commonplace, and used to result in the incidental creation of social capital.
