20 Day Stranger from Playful Systems on Vimeo.
20 Day Stranger is an upcoming mobile app (you have sign-up for early access) which is kind of like a real life, smartphone version of the classic game Journey, in the sense that it briefly connects you with a random, anonymous stranger -- only here, instead of going on a virtual journey, you share aspects of your everyday life (as the video above suggests) with another person somewhere else in the world. In that sense, it also reminds me a bit of Second Life at its best -- because unlike outliers like SL and Journey, most of the Internet is now focused on connecting you only with the people you already know. The app was mentioned by renowned academic Ethan Zuckerman in an inspiring talk about his new book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which I Tweeted about during an LA appearance last Friday:
The Internet now is very good at helping us find our tribes. We can't use it for encountering the rest of our world. @EthanZ of #rewire
— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) May 10, 2014
"We can work towards engineering serendipity" says @EthanZ LET'S DO THIS. #ReWire
— Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) May 10, 2014
More at the #ReWire hashtag.
Speaking of Ethan, he and I had a fascinating 2006 discussion of Second Life's potential (or non-potential) as a social activism tool -- read about that here.
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