A twenty-something woman ducks under a Starbucks awning, still feeling the storm’s cold, piercing ground spray playing at her ankles.   Slippery, taxi-filled West Village streets are no place for stilettos and suede.  Her thumb gently glides across a dormant iPhone’s LCD display.  The device glows. 

Tap tap tap…tap

She intently scrolls through a digital rolodex of friends and, more importantly, their relative locations.  The corner of her mouth subtly curls.  John P. just checked-in at The Spotted Pig, and he ordered deviled eggs.  I love those, she thinks, sending John a text message while simultaneously dashing into the night.

Previously, when I heard the word Foursquare, I thought of an elementary school game.  A stick of chalk and a kickball are the only required equipment.  The game can be played anywhere there’s enough concrete. 

It works like this: on the ground, a player draws a big box and splits it into quadrants.  Each quadrant carries a rank, first through fourth, with the highest position being occupied by the ‘King’.  Play begins when the King bounce-passes the ball into another player’s square.  Players attempt to deflect the ball into each other’s quadrants.  If the ball bounces in a player’s square and he is unable to parlay it into another, he is immediately demoted to the lowest ranked position and all other players are promoted a rank, filling the void.  The concept is simple – outmaneuver your opponents and become King. 

Thanks to Dennis Crowley, creator of this trendy and likely lucrative social networking tool, the word Foursquare has taken on a new meaning.  In case you’re unfamiliar, Foursquare is a digital tool that allows users to ‘check-in’ at just about every location on the face of the planet.  If a location is not listed in Foursquare’s massive database, users have the capability of ‘creating’ it.  Users can leave tips for others, enjoy exclusive discounts, keep track of friends, unlock hidden content, earn badges for completing specific actions (e.g. checking-in at a bar after 3 a.m. on a weeknight), and sync with their Facebook and Twitter feeds, all from one platform.

Like its namesake, Foursquare’s concept is quite simple – he who checks in the most at any particular location is crowned ‘Mayor’ (a much more democratic term than ‘King’) of that establishment.  Mayors enjoy discounts at some establishments, but the main reward is the recognition and sense of pride that come with being a de-facto authority at your favorite bar, restaurant, music venue, your apartment building or even your workplace.

To clarify why this is so remarkable, our physical world is being penetrated by, and overlaid with, our digital world.  The lines between physical reality and virtual reality are beginning to blur. 

The significance of this deserves a second look.  From Orwell’s Telescreens, two-way televisions used to spy on citizens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, to the movie Tron, in which real people are plugged into a digital game-reality and forced to compete with each other for their lives, writers and thinkers have been musing about this concept for a long time.  Technologies are shifting from being tools used to navigate reality, to being reality itself.  We’re tracing quadrants on the concrete, preparing for a game.

We should be very excited, and perhaps a bit tentative, about what comes next.  I envision a world where Second Life, the popular open-source virtual world, is populated by individuals who are hooked up to virtual reality visors and tactile simulators with olfactory simulators plugged into their nostrils.  Or perhaps people will be hooked up to surrogate robots, allowing individuals to control their robotic counterpart’s physical movements from the comfort of home (think Avatar); anything to make grocery shopping less of a chore, right? 

When I was 15-years-old, my dad bought me my first cell phone.  At the store he mused about the changing technological landscape.  I still remember him telling me about how he would have to call his friends’ houses and hope to catch them at home if he wanted to make plans.  He said, “If we didn’t catch them at the right time, we could try to find them at the soda bar.  If that didn’t work, we simply wouldn’t see them.” With Foursquare, not only are such measures unnecessary, but to make plans, direct communication itself isn’t even entirely necessary. 

John P. just checked in at The Spotted Pig.  Sounds like fun.

I really can’t believe ‘soda bar’ used to be a thing.