I completely enjoyed your humorous vignette of the Plano Texas real estate culture. Your unctuous audience represented well the duality of cultures that exist in our business today. Although profound changes are taking place in our national cultural complexion resulting from the decentralizing forces of the Internet, as you well know they are not taking place everywhere, nor should they. A parallel culture is developing. The Internet enabled Realtor may be lost in the Plano culture as strange as that may sound.
Theirs may be a conservative culture with a strong sense of place. A firm handshake and a promise still mean something here. Eye to eye contact, a pat on the back, wasting away a few mid day hours in pleasant and sometimes animated conversation is the mark of a square fellow, someone to be trusted. I have to admit, some of my best memories in recent years stem from conversations I have had with groups of people in rural Missouri. These conversations often take place at Sunday church picnics, or evening outdoor dances, or at the local meeting spot. The local meeting places are always the most productive, laden with rich insights and local humor. A parade of characters, young and old, drifts in and out throughout the day.

Arriving back home in St. Louis to the age of digital acceleration always engenders both a sense of excitement and a sense of loss. Clearly, to be effective here I must keep pace with hyperculture, and yet I understand the meaning and the roll of the rural culture as well. In the last few years I have noticed a greater interest in computers and the Internet in rural culture, and not always just among the young. It is slowly making its way into the deepest recesses of American life.

We all know by now that change is dynamic and difficult. Biology seems to play an important roll in the pace of change. It takes a thousand generations for humanity to evolve into an entirely new paradigm of life. Trusting the present paradigm of a sense of place has served agents well during the disintermediation wars of the near past, and I believe that it will continue to do so. Despite the fact that since 1994 I have been studying the new technology and investing heavily in hardware and software, I like to keep a foot in both cultures. I do enjoy the efficiencies in service delivery that the internet has made possible, but I also know that clients are not ready to give up the face to face meetings, or the human interaction involved in buying or selling, or the sense of place that those meetings validate. I believe there is room for all cultures in this business, and further I believe that there will continue to be for generations to come. The often touted Internet Empowered Consumer seems to me an inelegant term given the rich diversity and cultural texture of the American people. The Internet is clearly a transformational machine, but I thank God for the biological inertia that resists change and like gravity holds humanity together. I think its message is to enjoy life while we can.