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.

So where was I going? What was I doing?

Does it occur to us that every time we log on to the Internet – more often than not -we end up spending more time than we originally planned? More so at home, given that the proverbial ‘cyber café clock’ is not there to haunt us!
Over-running our planned Internet time is linked with aimless clicking from one page to another. WILF or ‘What Was I Looking For’ is the expression used to describe this phenomenon. WILF happens mainly due to the hyperlink-to-hyperlink clicking that we engage in. Reading about something, clicking on a link that has more to tell about the same and so on - the chain can be endless.
Once we are on to the chain we can easily lose track not just of time but also what is that we were originally looking for – thus ‘what was I looking for..” This chain starts with the random surfing that begins during the time that the browser window is loading the web-mail page, or the time between clicking on an attachment icon and the opening of the file and many more similar in-between moments. These are moments in which we engage in ‘checking out the other stuff’! As a result after about ‘2 hrs of what we would describe as ‘checking email’ and ‘surfing’ –what we have actually done is just about read 4 mails, deleted 15 spam mails and a lot of ‘random clicking.’ Many young college-goers actually suffer from such net addiction.

However this post is not about WILF. This post is about the potential impact of location aware mobile devices, on our movement in the everyday physical space. This post is about the possibilities that would emerge when our location aware mobile devices would start interacting with user generated soft maps (soft map = city map layered with information about personal preferences viz. my favourite pub, the quietest street, the best pizza, ‘my crush lives here’, get your camera & click the sunset from this point, the best park for the morning jog etc.)

When people would walk around while being constantly told, by the location aware mobile device sitting in their pocket, about the best that they could do in the place that they were in – wouldn’t they be prompted in a way that is similar to the way an interesting hyperlink prompts people on a web page?

Of course a lot of this prompting can be switched off – perhaps almost in the same way that we block unwanted pop ups on websites. However location prompts could be harder to resist for they would not just be linked with our physical location (and thus much more relevant) but also sensitive to our preferences that our mobile device would be much more aware of.
For want of a better example – Amazon’s customized home page is the closest web equivalent of an irresistible prompt of the location sensitive future.

I am curious to know the social impact of this consumer technology that is headed our way – soon!

Imagine young people wandering around the city, moving around district while staring into their mobile devices just to get to that place that their friend has tagged as ‘the place’ for the best local street snack, only to get distracted after a while by another tag that points at a spot which is best place to click the city from an elevation and then discovering a bargain on hand painted T-Shirts – that is two blocks away.. and then running into a GPS driven treasure hunt game organized by a bunch of local skateboarders who are looking for a partner..and at after a few hours of all this the person is left wondering where was I going, what was I doing?

Apps, Maps, Advertising & Paid Services

Selina Wu is a good friend of Rakesh & Joan Fang. They have all chosen to be ‘traceable’ to each other. So every time they come in 5 sq km proximity of each other, they get a prompt on their phones (through a GPS based application that is downloadable for free).
It is 7pm on Friday and Selina is driving home. She has only driven out couple of kilometers form office ad gets pinged that Rakesh and William are having drinks together in one of those Belgian joints. The place has been recommended to her by many but she never really got the chance to go there. Now, Selina might choose to just say hi to her friends over a call or text and set up a meeting for later. Alternatively she might want to join them for beer and finally get to see this place as well. But Selina does not know the way to the place and directions over the phone do not seem to be work for her. So she opens the maps application on her mobile phone and activates navigation. Soon enough, she is there and they are discussing the latest office gossip as the third pint comes up.

As you would have already guessed – there is no science fiction in the above scenario. Such applications (tagging select people) and services (navigation) are already available in select markets and soon in many. However in the scenario above, there are some underlying assumptions that I have worked with, while portraying this situation:

1. I am assuming that people like to be tracked/tagged the way I have illustrated here
2. I am assuming that people would not mind being interrupted (going home and then suddenly changing over to go to a pub with friends)
3. I am assuming that Selina prefers GPS directions instead of being told over the phone, how to get to a place. Or asking the passersby about the exact location of the place
4. I am assuming that Selina does not mind paying for the navigation service

These seemingly obvious assumptions can potentially be challenged in terms of a diverse social & cultural backdrop in different countries. For example my experience in India and China is that people prefer to ask their way to a place rather than using technology to figure it out. However I could be wrong given that such mobile navigation possibilities are relatively new in these two markets (especially India). Thus it might also be too early to conclude if this is a viable mass proposition in these two markets. Making people pay for a navigation service seems to be a challenge. This is perhaps true because City knowledge seems to be given for most of the residents and such things as maps and navigation seems to be more of a tourist or expatriate behaviour rather than local’s way of getting around the city.

However there could be alternative ways of helping people utilize navigation and yet not charge them for it. This can be achieved by overlaying an advertising layer on this. Here is how it could be done - just imagine the above scenario again but this time the Belgian joint that Rakesh & Joan are sitting in, subsidizes the navigation for Selina.
Why? Because with one more guest – the joint is going to make more money from the same table. So Selina gets her navigation to the place free, Rakesh and Joan get Selina’s company and the Belgian joint gets one more guest.
However this advertising layer still does not address the questions raised through assumptions 1 to 3. To me, having a convincing point of view on the first three is the tougher part.

Mobile applications and services like these among others, that I would be writing about in the subsequent posts, raise many fundamental questions about the adoption of mobile services, technologies and their social impact. This discourse would perhaps help in painting a clearer picture of what could work and what perhaps would not, in the post 3G mobile phones & services market.