Marketing Profs

Recently, a Kwik-E-Mart opened around the corner. You know, the one from the imaginary world of The Simpsons?

Of course the clever branding is not lost on me. Still, I'm fascinated that Kwik-E-Mart is a "real" venue—that the Geico Cavemen have their own sitcom and fictitious TV-character blogs are things that real viewers can comment on.

Somewhere between singing along with the intro to a kitschy TV classic to jonesing for our "Crackberry," it has already happened. You don't have to be a Twitter-head or a Second-Lifer to see the melding of your real and virtual experiences into one.

Our consciousness is increasingly occupied by the same mental constructs in both the physical world and the virtual media and communication world we all relate to and connect with. In other words, we are all living in VirtuReality, the experiencing of both the real and virtual at the same time, characterized by the following:

• Non-linear experiencing of time and place in multiple dimensions
• Hyperlocal connecting of physical objects with virtual identities and vice versa
• Digitizing our actions toward understanding the impact of our decisions

Each time you think about a brand, relate to a celebrity as if you "know" them, believe the value of your investments based on "imagined" future earnings, communicate with a screen or a fancy piece of wired plastic, wish you could "undo" or "rewind" a physically real experience, you are in essence merging your mental constructs of meaning into VirtuReality.

The Nonlinear Experiencing of Time

We're all familiar with reruns of episodic television, "retro" fashions and products, pop culture references being more common than historical ones, and bygone eras forever captured on celluloid, vinyl, and now digital music and video. But what happens now that we're all media producers?

The effect of recordable experiences by anyone and everyone seriously puts chronological consciousness in question. Today, TV Land viewers can already transport themselves to the past in two dimensions, so what's the compounded effect of multi-dimensional, multi-sensory experiences widely available?

The proliferation of Lifecaching, along with technologies like Brain-to-Computer UIs, geotagged innovations like Photosynth, essentially change how we experience any given time and space through input from everyone. As long as an experience has a recorded reference point, the reality of being able to transport yourself with any time and space known to anyone is soon becoming a readily available reality.

Even before that happens, just consider our use of hyperlinks now. Isn't a link both the past (produced earlier) and the future (outcome dependent on your decision to click or not click) to arrive at the present?