In 1980 I had a cat named Chance - pictured here with her kittens - also named after the gardener from Being There. I don't know what it is about that movie (aside from predating the much inferior Forrest Gump by a few decades) about being in the right place at the right time that captures people's imagination. But I do know that as an allegory of society., it is accurate. More than a few people are in positions of power or wealth simply by virtue of 'being there', and not through any qualification of their own. Which is why I guess people find physical presence so important.
As I have often said to business development people here at NRC, in order to be able to benefit from an opportunity, you have to be in the room, which is why participating in standards bodies and industry consortia and the like is a better way to generate results than locking people in their office and demanding they produce IP. But it's funny. The same dynamics don't work if you're looking to give or to share. As Alan Levine says, you don't have to be there to care (but you do have to be there if you want to take credit for caring). I'm not sure whether anyone has researched the imbalance between giving and taking in online and offline environments, but there's probably something to that.
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