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Now that Dave Winer linked me because of the post below on Shibuya Epiphany 2.0, I feel that maybe I should explain what is the Shibuya Epiphany to begin with. Well, maybe I should let the man who had the epiphany explain it. Mr. Rheingold, take it away:

Well Shibuya Crossing is a major intersection and there’s a railroad there. In fact it’s a place where people have gathered to meet each other for a long, long time; before modern Tokyo was rebuilt from the ashes of World War II, there used to be a famous dog who waited for her master at that station for decades, and one day her master died, didn’t come back, and the dog stayed there, for years, and people fed it. There’s now a statue of that dog, named Hachiko at Shibuya Crossing. Now of course today, Shibuya Crossing is a spectacular place where 1500 people cross the street in all directions every time the light changes; you have these gigantic building-sized television sets, some of which show images from the people crossing the streets, some of which show advertisements. It’s quite a sensory overload there. But what struck me besides the spectacular movement of this place, was that about every sixth person seemed to be looking at their telephone. When I saw that, I thought something unusual is happening here, and when I saw teenagers doing the same thing in Helsinki on the other side of the world in Finland a few weeks later, that really piqued my interest, and got me to start looking into this.

So, back in 2000, standing in Shibuya Crossing, Howard Rheingold saw people looking at their phones instead of talking into them, and that blew his mind. That’s the Shibuya epiphany.

Bonus treat – Shibuya intersection in Youtube:

So, if this is your first time here, welcome and as we say in Brazil, a casa é sua!