A new society, a new language
Communication in the digital world
The astonishing speed through which digital technologies has entered, influenced and radically changed our daily way of life is often something we do not immediately realize. The countless opportunities offered by internet and its applications has given us many benefits (as well as many dangers), but the aim of this article is not to embrace a moral crusade against technology or a blind praise of its improvements; rather, in the opinion of this humble writer, the real point is trying to understand these relentless changes in technology, which affect society and inevitably also language. Language is the set of rules and common meanings by which we can relate each other and understand each other, languages are different because we belong to different cultural heritages, which have constructed and modified languages for centuries until our modern-day version. Language is not fixed and is greatly influenced by changes in society, since, after all, we are the “users” of language and the final judges of what is the meaning of words or how they should be write.
Social Oceans
Social networks and social media have drastically changed the way we interact in our everyday life. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other have allowed something impossible before the affirmation of internet: the possibility to communicate instantly with a huge number of people, social network virtually recreates and substitutes social experiences in common places and open oceans of possibilities for interacting and meeting new people. Earlier communication tools, like telephone or letters, possess the main characteristic of having a two-fold structure: the communication could only take place between two individuals. It is not necessary having too many notions of sociology (which usually divide the interaction of people between groups of two and groups of three or more) to understand this increase in the reaching of a message given by social networks has revolutionary implications.
Keeping in mind this fundamental difference of the digital communication is the first step to keep in mind for every digital presence from marketing and communication strategies to our personal concern about our reputation in the web realm. The pervasive development of internet has provided each of us with a personal audience.
It could be tempting to regard our presence as insignificant in these social oceans and pay little attention to our digital identity, hoping for a fair anonymity, but the mechanisms of these technologies are incredibly accurate and capable of performing an enormous task of categorization, which, on the other hand, has make marketing jobs much easier.
Why data are better than gold
One of the main concerns in economics, especially microeconomics, is represented by insufficient or asymmetric information. It is quite evident that the major source of revenue for the web giants is the possibility of extracting information from our everyday life. Our digital behavior is carefully analyzed and translated into profit for the advertising industry, but also for political campaigning as we have ascertained in the last times.
Thanks to an unparalleled amount of personal information, marketing and communication dynamics have drastically changed: the target is well-know and defined, so there is no need for dispersive attempts to convey a broader message, even if we want to propose the same product to different targets it is still much more efficient to separately product suitable contents for each audience. Data are astonishingly valuable in economic terms, although people has only recently begun to worry about their protection.
Let the AI understand
The digital world under construction is characterized by an incessant transcription of human behaviors in rational terms, substantially, in a way processable by artificial intelligence, whose development is considered by many as one of the most promising fields of the near future. This need to rationalize human actions is quite evident due to the mathematic nature of IT knowledge, which require to transform our personal information into digital data. Acquiring more information about our interests and wants allow social network and browser activity to customize our internet or social experience in a way coherent with our profile (obviously we could delete data and clean our digital presence, a precaution ignored by many). Through the harvesting of personal data, it is possible the creation of reliable personality models which could allowed firms to reach an incredible detailed target. Facebook has shown with awful consequences the great advantages gained by advertising industry in the last times.
Unconsciously, we are advised and influenced in our digital behavior by ourselves or, better, by a digital mirror capable of capturing everything we do on internet. This fact could be positive or negative according to each opinion, but its principal teaching is represented by the incredible intermingling between AI and human behavior and it is not difficult foresee that the former will be able to codify and replace almost every human activity with some degree of rationality.
Human creativity claims its space
It is another well known fact that in the next years the skills required by job market will be more and more focused on all those competences not replaceable by AI and automation. Basically, everything that has to do with rationality will suffer competition from new technological developments, once that AI has finished to learn how to perform such tasks. Useless to remember the potential destructive social consequences of such developments, if we do not get ready in time.
Fortunately, there are still a lot of human activities that cannot be automated: it is worth recalling that the wild digital frontier must be built by man for the man, so AI could do a lot of things, but it cannot replace the essential role of man in interpreting a set of needs that are not completely rational.
Human nature is not always rational, as many of us have noted in the mistakes of everyday life (often with a great degree of exasperation), apart from a strict minority of people which has been defined as econs by Nobel prize Richard Thaler. In his study on behavioral economics, he refers to this category of people as those that are always able to make a rational choice, while majority of people, humans, often takes many irrational choices.
The inherent irrationality in human behavior implies that communication and market strategies should be carried out with a great degree of creativity, intuition and emotional intelligence, although at the same time they heavily rely on data. The great potential of expansion of markets involves an increase in competition between firms and it will necessarily require quality contents capable of distinguish themselves in the immensity of the digital world. Marketing has learned from social networks the large power of stories, which means brand identity and the ability to deliver not only a message about a product but to tell the story of the product or its firm. AI could not learn such complex and intuitive competences, since it is far from correctly interpret language nuances such as irony or sarcasm, so there is still a great deal of human work to be done.
Instantaneous communication
Internet goes fast, extremely fast and human ability to keep the pace is under considerable pressure. The different success of social networks demonstrates interesting patterns about human activity in the ubiquitous digital world. The strong growth of Instagram in the last years have illustrated how much users appreciate the instantaneity of use: few actions, a visual communication rather than a textual one and the possibility of making daily stories. Quality content must pay attention to these variables, especially the visual one whose role is to catch the attention of a user, who needs a valid reason to stop their usual feed scrolling.
Language has been drastically influenced by this tendency for immediate meaning, for example in 2015 the “Word of the Year”, the globally most used word, was not even a word but an emoji, the face with tears of joy. The changing in the way we communicate is obvious to many of us, though its significance may not be totally absorbed by traditional communication.
Specifically, our language is modified by the system through which we communicate and so it is not surprising that the more we use a system the more meanings and concepts are modified by the system which in turn is altered by our behavior. For the first time in human history means of communication are actively involved in the construction of meanings, in other words there is an interaction between us and digital technologies, the result of this interaction is a new language, suitable to the new digital society. However, society and people maintain many characteristics that have marked human societies for centuries, among these emotions are a particularly important feature of human communication: it is indeed a recognized fact that a message acquires more power and obtains more attention if it involves emotions, values and empathy.
Too many possibilities
With so many possibilities of communication and interaction, obtaining some digital visibility from users is something difficult. Money could help a lot, as in many other things, but a good strategy cannot rely only on economic power since a superficial approach could contain involuntary risks, which are capable of inflicting great damages in terms of reputation.
Technologies allow to control and monitor performances of advertising, giving detailed insights of the results obtained. Every strategy, as every economic operation, should be evaluated in terms of returns and efficiency, keeping in mind that a variable governed by chance and uncontrollable factors will always be in place, whose share in final outcomes may greatly differ from case to case.
As aforementioned, human behavior could not be absolutely predicted (thanks god) no matter how much development in AI technologies will take place in future times. Starting from this relatively fixed point, we could understand the importance of never forgetting the centrality of human being even in this virtual society. Digital communication is just communication in a new form which implies a fast, accessible and direct language for catching the very limited attention of digital users.
Rome was not built in a day and it would be pretentious to expect a perfectly working digital society in just few years, there is so much to learn in the language and in the way through which we communicate online.
The main issue is the need to appear different and unique in an ocean of infinite possibilities, this aim may be reached only with a careful and complete approach, in which communication plays a really important role, sometimes a critical one for the survival of a product, a firm or simply an idea.
