So much on my lifetime grudge against Tom Peters

Darryl Dash will call me a hypocrite for this post but here is Howard Rheingold chatting with Tom Peters

One very interesting comment in your book came from a young Japanese person who said that if a friend sent him text messages from some party he wasn't physically attending, he still felt as if he was there, just because he was getting messages. It seems to me that there's something huge in that comment.

HR: Yes, it is a huge comment because I think it indicates a generational norm that's changed dramatically. It used to be, and it still is among older people, that I'm going to meet you at 5th and Main at 7:00. And if you're not at 5th and Main by 7:20, you're late and you're rude. Apparently that norm has changed among groups of teenagers. In places like Finland, among adults, you don't say, "I'm going to meet you at 7:00 at 5th and Main." You say, "I'm going to meet you after work or before dinner downtown," and then you negotiate that. Sometimes whole groups of kids negotiate and then suddenly they all show up at a fast food place. They call it flocking or swarming behavior. And that's an example of collective action. It's not a political protest, it's just a social gathering.
There's a hotel I usually stay at in Stockholm and the bar/restaurant there is a popular meeting place. One time they were having a private party and to get in you had to show the text message invite on your telephone.
The whole thing was organized by four people who sent out invitations by text to everyone in their telephone address books. So it's this merging of social networks, communication networks, and places that causes this kind of collective action, the swarming or flocking behavior to happen.
If you're present in your social network, you're considered present. Researchers in Norway have called this the softening of time. Time is no longer the precise, crisp "if you're not there you're rude" agreement. It's softer than it used to be. That's a pretty major change.
I'd also point out that in Japan, this has caused a generational difference between the older folks and the younger folks. The use of the technology has certainly spread to everyone. But it used to be that parents would know who their kids' friends were because they would have to call the land-line and talk to them. Japanese homes are very small; people don't entertain there socially. They meet outside to entertain. Japanese teenagers' lives are pretty regimented. You can't really have a private conversation at home. Suddenly, it became cheaper for teenagers to have a cell phone than a land-line. They could communicate with their friends without their parents knowing about it.
As a result, parents no longer know who their kids' friends are. Which has happened pretty dramatically in the last five to ten years.
Another aspect of this new technology that's creating a gap between generations is the ability that kids have to write out messages with their thumbs while the cell phone is in their pocket or their school desk. Adults are not so adept at that.