9000 days, and 5 months
9000 days
It was 25 years ago today that Microsoft launched Window 95. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention at CERN may have pre-dated that launch by six years but it was Bill Gates who kick-started the era of the household PC and led families to take their first, tentative steps towards an online world. No longer, claimed Microsoft, was a computer just for offices but an everyday utility for homes.
Take August 24th 1995 as the beginning of a world wide web available to all and the web is little more than 9000 days old. In the long arc of history that is little more than the blink of an eye. But its advent has changed everything.
Excitement about the brave new online world rose to a crescendo through the late nineties, before crashing in the 2000s. Yet even as a slew of fantastical dot coms went bust and investors recalibrated their assumptions people continued to move much of their lives online. This process was accelerated by the arrival of smartphones, which at least four billion people now own.
At first slowly, then suddenly, the world was online.
4.65 billion people worldwide have access to the internet, leading venture capitalist Mac Andreessen to note that “every failed idea from the dotcom bubble would work now.” Life without the internet is all but inconceivable.
Five months
Of late it’s been more unimaginable than ever. Forced into lockdown and social distancing we’ve shopped, Zoomed and Netflixed our way through months during which there was no alternative to a life lived online. What was until March an adjunct to lives full of face-to-face interactions has been our world. Even those with little experience of, or appetite for, the online world have taken the plunge.
And yet hard though it is to imagine lockdown life without the ability to communicate with socially distant friends, families or colleagues, we’ve become painfully aware of the limitations of a life lived online. It is as if while feasting on sweets and chocolate we’re realising that what we actually needed was a hearty meal. Our cravings are satiated but not satisfied.
Some of the most poignant images of the lockdown have been ones where people have come together in socially distanced ways. Children interacting with their parents through the windows of nursing homes, music-making from balconies or the weekly clap for the NHS which has brought people to their front doors.
Life since March represents the high-water mark for online life. We’re grateful for countless communication tools, retail conveniences and a glut of entertainment options. Yet all of this has served as a stark reminder of the virtues of the visceral and the pleasures of social contact and interaction of an embodied kind.
As we’ve become more dependent on a life lived digitally, we have become all too aware of the limits of life online.
Tele-hugs won’t do it
Hubert Dreyfus, philosopher and critic of artificial intelligence once quipped that “Whatever hugs do for people, I’m quite sure tele-hugs won’t do it”. His point was a simple one. When we move things online we take our bodies out too. As an advocate of the philosophical tradition of phenomenology Dreyfus subscribed to the idea that the body is at the heart of how we experience and make sense of the world. The body is central to how we communicate and how we understand others’ feelings.
Take that view and it’s easy to see how much gets lost in a life lived online. A hug is so much more than an expression of love or warmth. It involves flesh and bones, bodily warmth and beating hearts, and the powerfully receptive, sensor-laden and expressive organ that is our skin.
In a narrow, technical sense, a hug can indeed be reduced to a series of zeroes and ones, transmitted across the internet and recreated as a digital representation like an emoji. It may even be reproduced through some form of mechanical, haptic experience. But that tele-hug offers no more than a glimmer of what a hug feels like: a loving communion of two bodies simultaneously transmitting and producing feelings of care and concern through contact.
The death, and rise, of distance
The long arc of technology innovation has bequeathed us a whole host of devices that offer tele-something or other: from the telegraph and telephone to television. All have made the distant close. These technologies have proved powerful and world-changing but none have ever wholly convinced us that there are not virtues and pleasures in actually being there.
A telephone call is a good way to catch up and makes us feel closer to people but is no substitute for sitting down for a cup of tea with a good friend. Television brings the world to our living rooms but few would argue that enables us to soak up the atmosphere of a concert or live football match.
Technologies that hold out the promise of intimacy often reinforce the distance they promise to evaporate.
Yet while we’ve been more acutely aware than ever of the pleasures, purpose (and impossibility) of being in physical contact with others the stubborn myth that we can do away with physical interactions lives on. Nowhere is this fantasy more in evidence than in the world of business.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, recently observed that he’d seen two years of digital transformation in two months. And it’s true that in a large scale forced experiment businesses, schools and others have learned to operate remotely. This has led to the prediction that the university campus will become a thing of the past, and MOOCs and online seminars will take their place. Breathless commentators predict empty offices will remain vacant now that managers have discovered that people can, after all, be trusted to work from home. The last rites of the office are being read.
Many of the forecasts of fully online and mediated lives that were being made in the late nineties are being reheated. And despite the fact that we enjoy better connectivity, technologies and tools than twenty years ago they are as wrong-headed now as they were before.
We crave the meaningful interactions that are only available to us when we are truly in the presence of others and are increasingly aware of what’s missing when we’re not. As INSEAD’s Gianpiero Petriglieri astutely observed: “it’s easier being in each other’s presence, or in each other’s absence, than in the constant presence of each other’s absence”.
It’s become clear that there are limits to a life lived online.
In the years since Bill Gates took to the stage with Tonight show host Jay Leno, with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” blaring, technology has moved from the margins to the mainstream. We’ve welcomed it into our lives, just as Gates hoped. But what’s become clear is that we’re getting a clearer line of sight on what’s missing when we move our lives online.
The simple story of a continued march towards lives lived in ever more online ways is hard to resist. And at the same time, it would be unwise to predict a strong swing back in the other direction. What the last few months have revealed is both the virtues of visceral, embodied ways of connecting and socialising with others and the possibilities, and often the efficiency, of a more mediated existence.
So it’s a safer bet to predict a more hybrid future where each finds its own, rightful place in the new order of things. A Zoom call with grandparents will be more regular but no replacement. Offices will continue to serve an important role for companies but with less expectation that it is the central location of work.
The work of establishing this new future has begun. Identifying and implementing a new settlement between the on- and offline world will require leaps of faith and imagination for planners, policy makers, managers and all those required to make decisions that reflect what’s possible and desirable. And to strike that balance will require acknowledging the limits of a life lived entirely online.
// Simon Roberts
The Power of Not Thinking by Simon Roberts is out in the UK in hardback January but available now in audio and ebook formats. In Australia, New Zealand, India and Thailand it is available now in paperback and electronic formats.
Simon Roberts is one of the world’s leading anthropologists in business. He advises some of the largest global organisations, including Intel, Facebook, Spotify, Google and many other Fortune 500 companies, through his London-based consultancy, Stripe Partners. His work has been covered by the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and BBC Radio 4.
