The Personal Frontier: the only space left beyond the virtual frontier

(Image from Enter The Void (2009) by Gaspar Noe)

Folk cultures and ancient mythologies reveal the anthropology of possession and space. As the first human tribes crossed out of the African rift valleys and encountered other unfamiliar species and geography, they were probably still nomadic in mindset and behaviour. For whatever reasons, when they settled or reduced their nomadic activity - because of stock, illness or providential richness of the land - they must have begun to lay stake on the lands as part of their communal possession. Within these settlements, as they outgrew the resources, groups would migrate again and settle. This cycle would have repeated itself many times, limited only by the fertility of the land and the people, when humanity was still largely agrarian. We know that as basic tool industry developed with the use of copper and iron, and bronze then steel, masonry and carpentry were greatly supplemented by these new technologies. Space became more defined, by boundaries not merely of stone, but of personal wealth.
Fastforward to our time, and MySpace, Facebook and your personal banking ID for online use, as well as access to personal details in your government database, and the frontier that defines our personal space has become virtual.
Even so, the erosion of that virtual privacy - caused partly by the new wave of "shared networking" online to satisfy the need for instantaneous exchange of personal information and updates - is fast removing the boundaries of virtual space. Without even the need to hack, it is possible to track down trace data of a person's activities or whereabouts or interests, by strategic online searches, whether you are a celebrity or any ordinary individual. In fact, with the rise of shared networks like Twitter or Facebook, there is no distinction between one identity and another - between celebrity or ordinary persons.
As a result, differences of opinion or preferences are now brought very much closer. Where once your picket fence or front gate formed the spatial boundary, that has eroded to the virtual domains online, but even so much of that is accessible within networks and certain protocols.
Ultimately today, people are more likely to feel threaten or their security vulnerable as the spatial zones dwindle to our very personal, individual sense of being.
This is the new frontier: where what we think, feel, believe in, desire and hope for, are directly becoming the area where possession and extension are being targetted. Where once polling samples could have representative clusters of a certain size, new statistics will need to aim for better accuracy with a larger threshold and more data collected. Wills, minds and hearts are the new territories in this arena.
Where once we spoke of collective will in terms of nations and sovereignty, of crusades and expeditions, as connectivity increases across continents, more and more people will be connected via their virtual identities and that would be the ultimate portal to access the personal space that defines the final remnant space or frontier of the human race.
So, there is no surprise that blogging is similar to the intellectual forum of exchange where the currrency is opinion and ideas, creating new thresholds of idea-related communities. This was the original basis of dot.com, virtual communities. What we will witness is the quantum leap in evolution of that original concept which was first conceived as the basis of the Internet. The emergence and success of the Facebook phenomenon will see how clusters of opinion and ideas can quickly be created and evolve in very dynamic speeds, compared with the static pace of the original dot.com.