Two worlds collided_1

Today we do more and more things online & large part of us lives in the digital world.
We,
• Email, chat (to communicate)
• Twitter update our thoughts/emotions (sharing/communicating)
• Mining, Sharing, Uploading, Downloading Information (for work or leisure)
• Blogging our hearts and minds (sharing/communicating)
• Networking (to socialize)
• Gaming (to entertain ourselves)
• Online avatars (for a Parallel Lives/entertainment)
• Shopping (for Leisure/Value)
• Buying/Selling/transacting cash (Commercial goals)
And many more..

If we were asked to think of things that we couldn’t accomplish online - they would mainly be those that involve a necessary interaction with the physical world of atoms. Most of the other things can be accomplished online.

This engagement with the digital world is manifested when we look at the three key ‘time zones’ in everyday life viz. home, work and commute - we see that our engagement with the digital is the physical world is illustrated even better.

Home Time
At home especially if the family is small without kids etc- the online behaviour is not much different from the office. We are either online – updating Facebook profile, organizing pictures on Flickr, reading a book online, or offline engaged in domestic chores, buying the stuff from super market, going out for work or socialization, taking pictures etc.
Home Time

Work Time
At work, we are predominantly engaged either with the digital world (email, web conference, web surfing, chatting, preparing documents etc) or the physical world – talking to a colleague, going for a ‘physical’ meeting, having lunch, smoking, walking up to a colleague’s cubicle, so on an so forth.

Transit Time
Even while we are in transit – a time when we are expected to be in the physical - we see people absorbed in their mobile phones – reading novels, or comics, viewing video clips, talking, playing games, texting so on and so forth.

To me it is much easier to understand our preoccupation with these digital interfaces when we look at them not as a PC, a Mobile Phone or a Laptop & instead look at them as elements of a new world that is taking shape. I call it a world because a large and growing part of the population is doing more and more things online. One possible way to evaluate the significance of the role that this world plays in our lives would be to visualize one month without it! Even if it is gone for 30 minutes, most of us feel lost without Internet at work for some of us it is true even at home!

The popular activities that people engage in when they interact with the new Online World have 3 key defining characters. (There could be more – but let us start with three.)

Semi-Anonymity:
The online world turbo-charges our reach. Although we continue to know a select group of people but our set of acquaintances grows multifold and the people who we interact with but might not know much about, grows even more. This vastly expanded network but relatively shallower understanding people in the network, (and thus weaker bonding with people in this network), gives us what I can be referred to as semi-anonymity.

Expression free from context:
I usually summarize it thus – “we are less shy, when we do not need to look in the eye!” The online world offers all of us a unique context because more often than not it does not make us think much about the context. It is much easier to say something personal, private, provocative or even intimate, and do this much sooner, in a relationship (or even when there is no relationship), when one does not need to do it in person.
The online world offers this chance! It frees the personal expression from the context in which it is being said – thus stakes seem to be lower.

Digitization of Physicality:
Unlike the physical world that operates in on physical dynamics governed by space – the online world collapses physicality. This makes the online world offer an entirely new paradigm to its users.

In the next post – I would attempt to illustrate how the above three characters of the online world impact our behaviour in different situations. How we make subconscious choices to carry forward the offline protocols and how sometimes we switch to new protocols.