Digital shapes new traditions

This summer 2016, I returned to the East Coast of the USA for the first time in over 15 years. The evolution of the internet over this period makes more sense to me now with US current realities more present in my mind, and it makes me wonder what is yet to come.

Before the burst of the dot-com bubble, working in New York’s internet economy felt like exploring new territories. In the days of Email and E-commerce, when smart phones and Facebook weren’t even on the horizon, we created businesses centered around webpages and domain names.

When I moved back to Germany in 2000, the future was rich with the opportunities created by the internet and I immediately set off to explore them.

Since 2000, Amazon and Google have grown from startups into economic powerhouses, fuelled by the spread of online technologies, and impacting countless aspects of our lives and work both in the US and in Europe. What I find striking now is how closely these businesses are deeply rooted in the geographical, sociological and economic realities of the USA.

Take, for instance, shopping. It proves a dramatically different experience in the US when compared with that in Germany. 
I found purchasing electronic equipment at a brick-and-mortar retailer in the US utterly frustrating. The staff were poorly informed about the products and often unmotivated to help. Not to mention the time it takes to drive to the store itself, multiplied by the number of visits required in order to get hold of the right product.

In supermarkets, the wide array of similar products — there are more variations of orange juice than you can come up with right there in that aisle! — makes for endless shelves that turn shopping into a slow-motion marathon.

While shopping itself is tedious, the surroundings of the shops and malls lack any attractive features. The hundreds of meters of hot sun-drenched asphalt between air conditioned car and cold shopping mall are more an ordeal than a stroll. The design of the cars on the parking lot is as uninspired as standardized mass-production output can be. And the scattered people you may meet on your way to or from the mall are mostly busy calculating what the heck made the final bill so high: not a great state of mind for agreeable chat.

This means one-click shopping with Amazon, with no driving, no arguing, no schlepping, but with a personalized greeting, next day or even quicker delivery, an easily searchable product selection and price reviews makes a lot of sense. It saves valuable time and actually proves more emotionally comforting than the visual yelling of high-street brands. Amazon prime is the best way to escape the aggressive marketing of brands that I don’t care about.

A discussion unfolded recently around „dataism“ and how algorithms are replacing humanism, with the library as the epitome of the cultivated spirit’s freedom of choice.
This perspective shows just how short sighted some discussions around digitalization are, especially when people working in the culture sector are often trying to hide their inability or laziness to contemplate the new horizons opened by the digital infrastructure. Figures indicate that in Germany, Amazon alone has 3.4 times more sales than its number two competitor, Otto. This success certainly shows that „dataism“ is creating experiences that have customers return, and return often.

If we compare the invention of the world wide web with the invention of the printing press, then we are probably working in the digital time equivalent of the publishing houses like the historical Maison Plantin in Antwerp. Humanism was born at that time, but it didn’t blossom until a century later. Dataism, or the network of networks, is still in its early days. Chances are it will spread a lot faster than humanism when the time is right, and that we will come to value it as a cultural treasure and warrant of our identity soon enough.