Last night I found myself trying to explain SXSW Interactive and "the point" of this whole convergence to some college friends here in Austin. It was a more difficult task than I had expected, but fortunately there were some liquids on hand to guide me to some half-intelligent responses. But the question was an important one, as it forced me to think about some of the broader themes and lessons emerging for me here.

My working thesis last night was this: As we begin using the internet and technology in new ways, we're also changing the way we interact and deal with both our human and physical environments. The net and mobile technology is forcing us to merge our real and virtual worlds, and that's something that we're dealing with consciously or unconsciously.

While this isn't an overly-complex point, the social affects of these new technologies really came to light for me in Danah Boyd's panel, "Designing for Global and Local Social Play." Liz Lawley spoke to the notion of "collapsing contexts" and boundaries between global and local, real and virtual. Lawley plays World of Warcraft, a massively multi-player online role-playing game, with people from all over the world in a very real context. Gaming used to be something that she could do outside of the context of her day-to-day social life, like an escape. But now she has this collapsed context where she, her friends, her children, her colleagues, and people she doesn't know can all find her online and interact with her.

Lawley travels a lot for work and conferences, but that doesn't mean she can't still be in close contact with her family. When she leaves the house for a trip, her children ask if they'll see her online. As Lawley puts it, interacting with their mother in a virtual space is now a reasonable [temporary] alternative for her children to actually having their mother in the house with them. And her children interact with her in a different context than they would in the real world.

Then there are all the tools that we use to get information about our physical world, either online or from our phones. At an earlier panel, we heard from one of the founders of Sociallight, a tool that allows you to put "virtual sticky notes" anywhere in the real world via your mobile phone, much like Murmur in Canada (also here). Or you can use Platial, a shared community-driven mapping tool, to add personal context to a place as part of a larger oral history. Or start your own Wayfaring maps for contexts relevant to you, like the Jacktracker.

We're not even scratching the surface of event-organizing sites like Meetup and Evite--or dating sites--that are collapsing the online and real-world contexts as we meet new people in trusted online spaces before we ever see them in the real world, requiring two different types of interaction.

Off to lunch now, but more on this soon about a cool exercise that allowed us to role-play in physical space some of the new dynamics that we deal with in virtual space.