Everyone seems to be talking about the blurring of boundaries between online and offline. You’ve got your FourSquare’s and Facebook Places giving our friends real time information on where we are and what we’re doing. You’ve got Cadbury’s Spots Vs Stripes (mentioned below) and Nike Grid taking the real world online (or is that the online world offline?) to allow real people to do real things in order to compete against one another. Then there are the countless presentations. Andy Whitlock’s Why Digital isn’t about Digital is a great presentation providing the case for online content being real – that’s how you get it to resonate with (and be passed among) people. Russell Davies’ Printing the Internet Out and Squirting it into Things reinforces this idea by highlighting the continuous desire for the tangible as a result of the “ubiquity of screens”.
This is all a bit of a build up to a new project by Aram Bartholl (via Bud Caddell). You can read more on the concept here, but the basic idea is an anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer filesharing network created by installing USB drives into walls in public places around New York. This 1) perfectly encapsulates the idea of online/offline becoming indistinguishable; 2) shows that the two are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact becoming increasingly inter-dependent; and 3) is damn cool!
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