This is something I’ve been wondering about myself, and Anil Dash sums it up excellently:
bq.. Once, there was fairly frequent interaction with people who weren’t your intended target of conversation. Speaking to a receptionist before getting to a business contact comes to mind, and its certainly an example that’s not going away any time soon, but the more casual conversations are the ones that intrigue me. Your friend’s younger sister who always ran to answer the phone first, the roommate of a person whom you spoke to frequently, your parents screening your phone calls when you were grounded; Those unexpected encounters with people often yielded extraordinary results.
[..] 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.
We might not notice that those social intermediaries are gone, but I suspect when we recall in the future the anecdotes that result from them, the kids who are born today won’t understand how a phone number used to belong to a family or a group of people or how, in the days before email, a message might pass under the wary gaze of a few unanticipated recipients. An “address” used to refer to a place, not a person.
>> “Anil Dash: Obsolescence of Happenstance”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/01/11/obsolescence_of
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