Communicating With a Digital Existence…..

I recently decided to travel to New York City in an effort to surprise my girlfriend and spend a little time with her as she is in the USA for 9 weeks (what I would consider a long time)

And whilst we had 5 days together, communicating since I have returned home has been difficult yes, but an allowance I am grateful for.

Thanks to free social hosts such as ‘viber’ and ‘between’ we can achieve more than basic communication.

With apps existing to ease the burden of distance between long distance partners, features such as the weather, date, time and location of the other person, along with graphics detailing the time since they last saw each other. Also it features a blog style chat service. This exists only between you and your partner, and is meant to be used to summarise ones day.

This fantastic, progressive app begs the question; are long distance unions’ achievable?

In the pre-web world, couples would go for days without speaking or touching base with each other and even in the pre-smartphone era where we still had cell phone communication, time zones, shitty reception and high cost of contacting your trans-atlantic lover were obstacles that would take a strong minded person to overcome day after day.

Now a new platform has emerged from the 4G, public wi-fi landscape. The comprehensive yet info-lite platform eases the stress and loneliness of being away from your partner. The best thing about it is both people are not need to be online or evan available at the sometime. A post or a text can be left on there for days before someone checks it, but when they do, the sender is notified.

It achieves so much more than the standard Skype and messaging applications because it not only projects the person onto a screen in realtime, it gives them a total online profile to match their real life presence. It mimics regular social interaction through the sharing of memories and thoughts.

It creates a digital presence out of the person that is not present. It is possibly the closest thing that will attempt to recreate the person in another location. (until holograms I presume)