There were virtual worlds in the West before the advent on the internet.  In the 18th century, it was a Jane Austin novel.  In the mid-20th century, it was the films of, say, Hitchcock.  These virtual worlds were more or less fully formed, teaming with people and events we could relate to and identify with.  Fully formed, they were, but extremely well sealed.

These virtual worlds were closed worlds.  No one ever from stepped from an Austin novel or a Hitchcock film into our lives.  Yes, we might  say someone in our actual world was a lot like Darcy or Roger O. Thornhill.  But this was the work of imputation, with meanings transported across state lines, as it were. 

The virtual worlds of the late 20th and 21st world are something else again.  It is now routine to have someone we know from the blogging world or a role-playing game appear before us as flesh and blood.  And when this happens it always seems to me like a scene from the movies in which a character moves from one dimension to the next, materializing as he goes.  (What is that SciFi TV shows where they are always passing through that time portal?  That’s it, thank you, Stargate SG-1.  I believe they use even use that Star Trek "materializing" sound, now, I guess, the signature of cross dimensional transportation.  If and when his machine is real, it will come with this sound installed.)

So today, I am going to meet a couple of people for lunch in Manhattan who are friends of a virtual friend, so the remove is even more pronounced.  We do have a lot in common, our European friend.  Will this be enough to sustain a conversation?  Or will we all wish we were back on line in a more accommodating virtual world, where conversation and contact is too brief to awkward or onerous?

Eventually, we’ll learn to live in a new kind of social universe that consists of virtual and actual worlds living side by side.  We’ll learn to negotiate sudden transitions back and forth.  I guess eventually, we will have a protocol for negotiating these very odd social situations, but for the moment it’s all improv.

Every so often, someone comes to my blog because they used "Geoffrey Frost" as their search term. 

I didn’t ever meet Geoffrey Frost.  But when he died in 2005 I began to read about the innovations he created at Motorola, and I came to think of him as an exemplar.  He seemed to me the kind of person that marketers, designers, anthropologists, and innovators want to be now.  He could summon big ideas out of the heavens and then shepherd them through the corporation until, viola!, they issued from the factory door and ended up blooming with value in the life of the consumer.  Frost was in short exactly the person the corporation now cares about, that b-schools want to graduate, that all of us want to be. 

I didn’t know Geoffrey Frost but I am now to be proud to be a small flicker in the flame that keeps his memory alive.  Motorola has been surprisingly unforthcoming.  Not worse than any other corporations, but just little…I don’t know… uncomprehending.  I’m not saying that they should have started a cult of personality, but surely their corporate culture wanted to remember an innovator of this order a little more vividly…especially now that the innovation well at Motorola appears to have run dry. 

The great thing about serving a memorial function in a new internet era is how easy and effective it can be.  You know the old drill.  Someone is sitting on her balcony drinking a beer, and combing the heavens, and she thinks, "Hey, I wonder what ever happened to that Geoffrey Frost guy, the one at [Connecticut, Choate, Yale, J. Walter Thompson, Grey Worldwide, Scale, McCabe, and Sloves, Foote, Cone & Belding, Nike, or Motorola].  In the old days, this idea would prompt the question: "who would know?" and the ponderer would make a mental note: "ask Jimmy whatever happened to Frost."

These days we go to Google and I am proud to say, my post "Remembering Geoffrey Frost" is top of the return. Proud and a little anxious.  The story I banged together in 90 minutes is now going to tell the story?  Did I check my facts?  Could I have been clearer?  Did I honor the guy sufficiently?  The good thing about an electronic memorial is that gathers comments, clarifications, amendations, and there are now about 12 of these in place, complete with a dissenting opinion that says he was not an exemplar of any kind.  The dissent represented an interesting problem.  As a keeper of the flame, should I let it stand?  Should I delete it?  I left it in the interests of full disclosure, but also to show what Frost was up against at Motorola. 

In the old days, I could have written an obituary for an quarterly industry newsletter.  It would have disappeared from the shelf in 90 days, and from memory in 180 days.  I could have told the Frost story at the bar when creatives gathered, an oral tradition that would died with me.  I could have written an article or a book that would have achieved greater permanence, and outside the academic community, total obscurity. 

But no.  These days, it’s possible not just to create a memorial.  I can now network for the dead.  My post sits there bobbing, a message in a bottle, in the great green sea called the internet, waiting for a passing stranger to fish it out and have a look.  The memory is a little brighter.  It is more active in the world, more likely to recruit others.  In fact, this memorial is less memorial in the usual sense, less passive, that is to say, and little more like a meme poised to find its way into the world.  This memory is less a memory and more an idea waiting to happen again, to make the difference Geoffrey Frost would have made if he were still alive.  I hope.   

References

Manners, Tim.  2005.  Motorola’s Edge: an interview with Geoffrey Frost.  The Hub: Thinking Marketing for Business Visionaires. September/October 2005.  here. 

McCracken, Grant.  2005.  Remembering Geoffrey Frost.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  December 19, 2005. here. 

McCracken, Grant. 2007.  Feoffrey Frost and the perils of the fast lane.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  May 16, 2007.  here.