by Marzena Czarnecka

Lawyers have been cautious about using social networking but are gradually embracing the use of social sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Web 2.0 continues to challenge lawyers as they realize that opting out of this new system of connection may equal opting out of business

“One evening there was a remarkable breakdown of the local telephone system. Anyone who picked up the phone could hear everyone else at once. Hundreds of voices – some sounding distant, some close by – hovered in the first social virtual space I had ever experienced. An instant society of children formed, brilliantly superior to that of the schoolyard...”

Thus writes Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist-artist-entrepreneur who coined the term virtual reality in the 1980s, about the seminal childhood experience that inspired him to work towards developing a communication medium that would “subvert” the rules of the physical schoolyard – or brick and mortar workplace – and dangle the promise of “a virtual agora that brings out the best in people.”

Lanier's first virtual reality experience, detailed in “A Childhood Between Realities,” an essay in John Brockman's Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (Pantheon Books, 2004), recounts the telephone system breakdown. While adults panicked and railed against the telephone company, the children played with the possibilities. Small wonder, perhaps, that those children, Lanier included, went on to invent the web and continued to play with its possibilities, giving rise to its more and more complex incarnations, each one of which is generally characterized by improved, more sophisticated – simultaneously more intimate and more virtual – communication tools.