Progress is a wonderful thing. The inexorable march of online living, technology and the sprawling social networks that have come with it, have propelled those who can afford it into a 21st century filled with an endless stream of content for the demanding digital citizen.
Captive digital market
It's not hard to see why businesses and brands desperate to stitch themselves into the fabric of the new consumer consciousness have come to see leaping into this digital wonderland as a magic solution. Digital "stuff" can illuminate and expand brand presence, overcome budgetary and operational challenges and hide inadequacies all in one shot. The captive audience is huge. There's a heaving mass of relentlessly connected creatures out there superglued to one device or another.
And in a world where people talk to people, machines talk to buildings, homes talk to owners, bus-stops chat to commuters, cameras speak to police stations, clouds speak to cables and ideas speak to reality through 3D printing – the opportunities for businesses and brands to inveigle themselves into consumers' consciousness are endless.
Our kaleidoscopic ability to multitask, searching for a holiday, gaming, booking a table, sending an email and grabbing music downloads (illegally, of course) between Wi-Fi hotspots presents a wonderland for every service, product and platform designer, innovator and engineer.
For a business seeking to build a meaningful and differentiated social brand, stimulate innovation, move from a bought media to an earned media model or embrace the communities of social entrepreneurial brands, this fluid world with its social networks and endless playgrounds of content offers a host of opportunities. There are an infinite number of opportunities for a business to create added value and reach a new audience.
Even the downsides to our electric speed of life can be turned into positives in our newly connected world. A number of businesses and brands have already seized on aspects of the digital distemper: the loss of real human connection and community, the dislocation of the poor and elderly, the rise of cyberbullying, the collapsing quality of content and concern about whether heavy mobile phone use could microwave our brains. Some businesses have turned these negatives into a higher purpose beyond profit, taking them up as new causes to fight, using the networks and platforms for social cohesion, volunteering schemes and outreach projects, delivering apps that donate and microfund community action and galvanising employees to give back.
Digital obesity
But there is a danger in this "bad into good" model. I believe it can disguise a far more insidious malaise. We are, in digital terms, becoming morbidly obese and businesses and brands asserting their digital persona will only make the condition worse. To grasp some measure of the potential tonnage of digital stuff coming our way, one only has to look at the seismic budgetary shifts in marketing and communications investment from traditional and new-media channels and in operational emphasis to online customer retail and service models.
Businesses and brands cannot simply lay the responsibility for healthy levels of consumption at the door of consumers. In our super-size-me digital world they have engineered a growing plethora of options – a curse that we seem incapable of casting off for fear of not being "connected".
We are in an endless lock-in at the all-you-can-eat big-byte buffet and we've eaten the key. We are becoming increasingly immobilised by our mobile selves, screeching to a halt mid stride, sentence or sleep to answer the seductive vibration and ping of another digital missive. We are increasingly crippled by the devices sitting in front of us, paralysed by the mere thought of losing power or connection. More and more of us are quietly and invisibly suffocating under the sheer weight of multiple personas, accounts, passwords, profiles and screen devices. For some, digital citizenship is crushing, both physically and spiritually.
People in business are doing less with a 24-hour BlackBerry habit than they did by walking down the office floor and only answering calls in office hours. We now manage tsunamis of emails by playing pass the parcel and administrating the professional persona we want the world to see, not who we are or what we're really worth.
Even at our current level, if bytes were calories some of us would be the lead feature in a real-life story magazine with pictures of our larger-than-life bodies unable to leave the chatroom other than by crane once some walls have been removed. We are indiscriminately consuming supersize portions of content and correspondence at greater speed and greater volume than ever before and to such a degree as to create the very opposite of the nirvana our interconnected togetherness promises.
Our digital neediness and the brands and providers that serve it are driving a culture of digital consumption that is overwhelming and unsustainable – and ultimately destructive.
Quality over quantity
We need editing and deselection tools, not another shedload of tat – a role that businesses and brands could embrace to amazing effect on both their constituencies and their reputations.
In pursuit of exploring the edges and effects of digital obesity I would invite the sharper and more inquisitive brand and business minds to get out the slide rules and calipers, and get to work on a transparent assessment of the situation. Social and digital strategists must honestly consider the more toxic downsides of our digital brilliance, and consider the subtler psychological impacts of our consumption when plotting a new digital dimension.
Only then could we all leap into this new world with a clear understanding of what we are getting ourselves into and what a sustainable and healthy digital citizen really needs.
Julian Borra is founder and creative strategist at the Thin Air Factory
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