The Importance of Being There

Bill Thompson’s thought­ful con­clu­sions on attend­ing a sem­i­nar to see Clay Shirky think out loud about social tools, a sem­i­nar that he might just as eas­ily have attended online, but one he was dri­ven to attend in per­son by an ‘inner need’:

What is clear, how­ever, is that the bound­aries between the online and offline worlds are blur­ring as we put our hands through the looking-glass of the screen to shake hands with those on the other side, occa­sion­ally pulling them back through into what we still like to call “real life”.