Liquid Borders

Borders are blurred. New user communities – as large as countries – emerge seemingly out of nowhere, and previously well-defined and differentiated environments, such as work and private life, begin to fade. No more watertight compartments. Young people of the new generation are able to write a blog and respond to a work email while watching a show on TV. They are
digital natives
. It doesn’t matter what physical space they’re in. They can communicate at the same time with their partners, their bosses, their friends and their collaborators. When a kid goes online every day from Spain to chat with another guy who lives in the United States, he is breaking down the physical and cultural barriers that we know. That’s why we’re talking about liquid borders.

One of the characteristics that best define the new scenario is the flow structure. This revolutionary phenomenon is changing the way we work, and the way we understand the world and relate to others. Humanity has never had a flow structure characterized by its global reach and lack of spatiality. The clearest example is Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, CNN, Wikipedia and other large Internet communities that already have more than 100 million users.

In just a few years, these communities have gone from nothing – they didn’t even exist before – to being among the 15 most populous countries in the world. FaceBook, for example, is one of these new “countries”: it has a population (active users) of 67 million inhabitants, receives more than 101 million visitors and grows at a rate of 250,000 inhabitants (new registrations) per day. It’s a very diverse country where users from virtually every nation in existence share 14 million photos daily, and participate in more than 6 million interest groups.

As Manuel Castells anticipated, in his book “The Information Age”, a genuine social revolution centred on information is taking place; A revolution that is transforming our way of thinking, producing, consuming, trading, managing, communicating, living, dying, waging war and making love.

“Space and Time, the foundations of human experience, have been transformed, as the space of flows dominates the space of places and timeless time replaces the clock time of the industrial age”

In short, these are new communities of flux in which we must find our place as people and as organizations. If in the past we built our social identity on a Feeling of belonging to a place, to a religion, or to a certain culture, we must now learn to construct that identity within it. global flow of information and knowledge; We must be encouraged to visit these new virtual communities as tourists of yesteryear, and we have to do it in the same way as our digital natives: interacting, playing and enjoying.