Capping IT Off
Being lost seems to be a concept that will become history and needs some explanation within 50 years. I really like to get lost some times, especially since you can discover unexpected things in those moments that you would have never seen if you hadn’t been lost (for example a nice book store with great books, or a little restaurant serving the best pasta there is, or finding your perfect partner while asking in which direction you should travel). Google just released Latitude (in my opinion quite similar to Brightkite, Loopt, or Dodgeball that was recently shutdown by Google) which is another tool that makes it a bit more difficult to get lost while wandering around looking for places where your friends could be.
I really wonder if you can get lost in about ten years, although I am pretty sure you cannot get lost within 50 years unless you are doing it on purpose (well what fun is in getting lost when you have to do it on purpose?). Is it still possible to just pick a direction on your holiday to wander off and to end up having no clue where you are and how you will ever come home? Or will we end up using some sort of device (or even no device at all since ubiquitous computing will became more mainstream then) to look up our location and to determine which we way we should go to get home again?
Being lost is a great is concept, either on holiday, in a library or in big pile of data. You can discover great things you would never had seen if you weren’t lost. Adopt Ron’s prediction about being delibaretely disconnected, do not filter your RSS reader with postrank or any other filter for any information at all and get lost. As Thomas Edison once said: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Delibaretely disconnect, drop all your filtering and guidance tools and get lost in your data, create your pile of junk and make great inventions. If you are not prepared to make mistakes (due to all the guiding and filtering), you will never be creative.
Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via 
or 
About the author
Rick is on a day to day basis working on social media (strategy) cases for several (Fortune 500) clients. He lives and loves social media, helping people and enterprises in using social media in a way that adds value for them. He also gives guest lectures at several universities to make students aware of the impact social media will have on their life in general and on enterprises in particular in the near and not so near future. Is he a geek? Well… yes. A geek with a social life though. Even one with a wife and a young son, who’s first English words were ‘Social media’.
- More at
Very nice piece Rick, makes you wonder (o no that’s not possible any more) if we really want to know where we are. I think we are going to go back to basics again just like some people do now on holiday. Just a tent, maybe a car, but no phone, internet or other stuff to feed our addiction.
Getting lost will become the new hype of an “always know where you are” future!
Hey Rick. Nice post. There actually is a cool and Web 2.0 style way to get lost on the web: StumbleUpon. Or try the random article on Wikipedia.
Last summer, I spent the holidays in Sweden. If my wife doesn’t pay attention to where we are going, we always get somewhere where we didn’t intend to go. And that often turns out to take us to really beautiful places. So, here’s my advice: lose the tomtom/navman/whatevernavigator before you go on your holiday and then get blissfully lost.
Rick, Excellent take on the concept of ‘being lost’, especially in relation to creativity. Serendipity rules!
Ps. Before these newfangled digital location devices came along, people used to read maps or (heaven forbid) ask each other for directions.
Jude, I like the asking-each-other part. You could meet so many new and interesting people (or even the love of your life) by just interacting with strangers.
I really like how you’ve phrased it. The “aimless” wander, the exploration can be a pretty tough sell these days, given that just about daily there’s a new tool to better slice, dice, and filter your online life.
It’s something I ponder a fair bit, given that part of my job is educating and evangelizing PostRank. However, at the same time, I regularly hear folks worry re. not wanting to miss the hidden gems, and I share that concern myself. :)
What I’ve noticed, anecdotally, though, is that (to continue the metaphor) there are places where you want to get lost, and places where you don’t. A cookie cutter modern suburb compared to a medieval village in the south of France, for example.
Many of us have info we need to keep abreast of, for more “official” reasons – for work, for research, etc. Similar to that is information we want to find for specific and possibly one-off purposes, like learning how to do something. Unless it’s going to become a work skill or a hobby, once I learn how to do it, I don’t need to keep track of the site where I found the info anymore.
But then there are the places (online and off) where we want to go and want to be and want to come back to. Information that continues to be fascinating, stories that ensnare us, writing that inspires us.
And I think we tend to know or at least have an idea of the “neighbourhoods” where those kinds of information are found, and they tend to be separate from where the “official” information is. So it works out that we can let go and get lost in those neighbourhoods, while streamlining our work in the official ones so we can get back to the fun ones faster.
And, of course, the most important tour guides of all to the best places to get lost in are our social networks, the friends, family, and others who find the gems and pass them along. I think it’s as important to cultivate those relationships as it is to find and use tools to make more efficient use of our information.
As you say, being lost is a concept. And concepts are just man-made descriptions of how things are or seem to be. I’m not an expert, but I think it is fairly obvious that cavemen didn’t have or need a concept for being lost. They just were in the place they were.
The concept of lost will be replaced by some other concept. One that in ten or twenty years will be the norm for us. And when something new comes along and that concept is gone. On and on.
I agree that any concept that is related to navigation, maps, being lost etc. will be obsolete in less then 50 years. Maybe not for each and every human, but those that have access to digital tools of some kind.
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration, this is definitely something that deserves more thought.