Digital hybris

The rise of more sophisticated products and services in the digital sphere have sparked an almost religious believe in a caste of so-called creatives that the digital sphere will provide solutions to almost anything.

I am sitting right there in the center of it all. I run my office from Kreuzberg in Berlins creative hub.And I am part of it. My whole neighborhood is filled up with people that can work from anywhere, anytime. Everybody ‘works on projects’. Everybody has at least 20 business concepts in the pipeline. Everybody is incredibly busy.

I have been working in the creative industry for quite a while, and I have seen times like this before. They called it the dotcom bubble. Only it wasn’t backed by years personal digital experience. Nowadays everybody has an iPhone (or Android or else) and has a personal connection to the digital sphere. The key being personal here, we take it personally, so we have an emotional stance. This might blur our judgement, though. This is what I want to talk about.

Which is strange anyways, since I do not publish often on the net. I usually feel that most everything has been said on the net, elaborated, discussed… everything. But this time its different, I speak up (thanks to you @medium, with your low-barrier-of-entry publishing system)

An offline analogy

To make better sense of it, lets compare the digital sphere to the physical world (its lame, I know). Its like on a crowded party, a lot of people are talking about all kinds of subjects. Anything really that they have the remotest thing to contribute at all. On a party, depth does not matter really, as long as you don’t make a fool of yourself. You basically just show that you know your way around a subject and then the conversation moves on. Depending on your character, you will or will not restate stuff you caught up (to be fair, there are lots of people on a party that really know their way around a subject).

For me it’s like this in the digital sphere: I don’t like to remix and restate stuff. I don’t want to participate in this self-reinforcing loop that sits at the heart of online opinion making and mass psychology of a whole generation.

Which is kind of a ridiculous statement as I am talking to a very selective audience of online opinion leaders here on medium (if anybody cares to listen). Take it as an appreciation of the power of the social web. If I did not believe in it at all, I would nail this post to some tree (I would still have an audience, given the density of potential readership in my neighborhood).

Powerful.

But this power seems exaggerated nonetheless. Just because I can do a lot of stuff in the digital sphere now, that was done elsewhere, doesn’t make it the solution to anything. If I look at all the bold business plans around me, I see all kinds of ‘disruptive’ or ‘next-generation’ technologies, services, products (anything hacked together at a barcamp gets called a product or app nowadays). And not too many take the human side of things into account. Speaking for myself, I do not want to drag all parts of my life digital, just because I can.

The whole Startup movement is based on this simple idea: what else can we drag into the digital sphere, develop, commercialise and then sell. At the end of the day there will always be someone who believes in it.

An easy expert.

Expertise has become a commodity in this process. Anyone is an expert nowadays, especially in the creative caste, which is only natural, since we spend so much time online. We develop pretty strong opinions, or we take the collective opinions of our peers as our own. An it does not take a career to develop this expertise either: Just some hours of online research will make you an expert on almost everything in the eye of a casual observer. We are back in the reinforcing loop.

No offence taken.

I do not judge this situation, I can only see that we are all revolving a lot about this digital sphere. Maybe we should consider some basic questions, before we come up with yet another idea:

Do we want to have this experience digitally?

Is this personal or is this something that comes out of my peer group?

Is it worth it?

Is there something I would rather be doing?

A good jump-off point for me, I rather end this post now…

Bye.