Welcome to the Age of Digital Proxiimity

This has been a long time in the coming. We all knew we would eventually get here, but we are here a lot sooner than we expected. You saw it in the Matrix, Ready Player One, more recently in shows like Upload on Amazon Prime, but really we have known it all along. We live parallel lives, one in the physical world and  one in the digital world (or is it many?), and for all these days they remained largely separated. Those that we connected with digitally, we rarely interacted in the physical world and vice versa.

Enter COVID-19, these two worlds have now collided and there is a strange hybrid that is resulting. People who had limited existence in the digital world have been thrust into it. The concept of co-working spaces is  coming under scrutiny. The effects of the work-from-home are stark. Did you see that New Delhi, one of the most polluted cities in terms of air quality has seen the best air quality in decades. Who really needs to go to an office any more. Granted, there are huge sectors of our economy that requires physical presence, but there is a growing sector that can really get the job done from home. My hypothesis is that micromanagers and companies held back this revolution in the past because they just did not trust that the employees would be productive without supervision. This crisis has exposed that myth to a large extent.

For well over a decade now, with the advent of social apps and messaging platforms, we have slowly migrated our communication medium to largely digital. I remember when I first came to the US to pursue my graduate degree from India, I would receive a letter about once a month from my parents, inquiring about my well being and giving me some updates on the home front. I would promptly (yeah right.. sometimes prompt was two weeks later) reply to that letter and an entire exchange would take all of 6 weeks. The phone call was way beyond budget unless it was an emergency. At $2.50 for the first minute and $1.92 for each additional minute, it was the money pit that made a black hole seem like a benign phenomenon. 

Fast forward thirty years. If a WhatsApp message or text is not answered in a few minutes (or seconds, if it's an anxious mother!!), all hell can break loose. It is as if we live in a different world. We are all right next to each other in this world. The entire world packed into a 10x10 room that cat fit an infinite number, and everyone is just an arms length away. Seems like a room that would exist in the world of Alice (in Wonderland). A digital tap, warrants a response in quick time. 

For a while, this applied to only relationships in your personal network. No longer. Entire groups of people are ‘zoom’ing in and out, and it has become the way of life and for many companies, it's business as usual. The employees are all together in a digital working space, and in some ways, with less distractions, no politics, no coffee room chats, no commute, less pollution, and the list goes on. In our company, right from the get go, we have always been a remote workforce, and I thought we were fairly unique. Not anymore I guess. What was once the exception is now the rule. The Age of Digital Proximity is upon us.

Love it or hate it, it is here. But sometimes, a  crazy thought enters my mind… if we stay here long enough will the reverse ever happen, where we have to go thru ‘digital isolation’. Maybe that will drive us mad faster than any kind of ‘social/physical distancing’ ever will. 

Would love to hear your thoughts.