Chapter Three: Diginomic Lifestyle

“A new civilization is emerging in our lives. This new civilization brings with it new family styles, changed ways of working, loving and living; a new economy, new political conflicts, and beyond all this, an altered consciousness as well.”

Creating a New Civilization

Alvin Toffler (1995)

“(T)he world, the economy, and all the rules of business are changing … This new global situation is turning the world economy upside down … The economy for the Age of Networked Intelligence is a digital economy.”

The Digital Economy

Don Tapscott (1996)

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In light of today’s global upheavals, these ancient words seem to be ripped right out of this morning’s “Op-Ed” section of the newspaper. In our transition into a globalized world, the laws of Entropy seem to be in full swing. More about that in our next chapter.

As the world reshapes and redesigns itself, it is rapidly and optimally adopting the technologies required to maximize convenience. Why sweat? There’s no need to. Just push that button.

Like the car commercial whose ubiquitous mantra is “Zoom! Zoom!” – they have effectively captured the mindset of the new global culture of speed and ease. In the evolving Diginomic Lifestyle, the speed of Life needs the speed of Light to thrive and prosper.

Click-n-Buy

“There can no longer be any doubt that the future of business is inextricably bound up with the Internet,” the president/CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, was quoted in DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION as saying in 2000.

Michael Robert and Bernard Racine agree. From their 2001 work entitled, e-STRATEGY PURE & SIMPLE, “e-commerce is changing the rules everyday – making it even tougher for brick-and-mortar companies to develop strategies for survival in the new economy.”

As of this writing (May 2009), the total world population sits at 6.7 billion souls, 1.6 billion of whom have access to the Internet … fully one-quarter of the earth’s population. That’s a lot of people coming to visit!

For the third quarter of 2007, the Department of Commerce reports that online electronic retail sales totaled nearly $35 billion – a 3.6% increase over the second quarter of 2007, and a 19.3% increase over the same period in 2006. As compared to total overall retail sales, online shopping accounts for 3.4%.

Jonathan D. Freidan, E-Commerce Law:   “Though online spending is still a fraction of total consumer spending, it is growing at a rate of more than 25 percent annually.”

There are over 4 billion global subscribed users of cell phones today … over 67% of the world’s population. Aside from making phone calls or texting, the cell phone is on a fast track to being your electronic wallet whereby wireless purchases are made on the fly. It’s also being used as your personal scanning wand for food, clothing and department store purchases.

The December 2007 issue of Baseline magazine announced, “Cell phones may soon make everything from digital coupons to mobile marketing possible.” In its lead story reporting on forthcoming innovations that would impact and change the retail industry, the magazine went on to say that “cell phones could also house RFID chips, making them an alternative to credit cards as a payment vehicle.”

International business consultant and author, Kenichi Ohmae, in his book, THE NEXT GLOBAL STAGE, writes: “The interconnected, interactive, global economy is a reality. It is often confusing and disorienting. It challenges both the way we see business and the way we do business.”

“The mobile Internet – mobile commerce – will dramatically change what has already dramatically changed the world,” says Richard Silber of Accenture. “The wireless world will be a truly global market … Get ready for the ride of your life!”                  ■

Next: Diginomic Globalization

Diginomic Mobility

INTRODUCTION – Part Two of Five

As we proceed through this series, we will look more closely at what I call the Five Pillars of Diginomics: Diginomic Money, Diginomic Mobility, Diginomic Lifestyle, Diginomic Globalization, and Diginomic One World

Diginomic Mobility –

From the book, Blur – the Speed of Change in the Connected Economy (Stan Davis/Christopher Meyer, ©1999, Warner Books), “Capital in the traditional sense is no longer the basis of enterprise value. In an economy marked by unprecedented Speed, what’s valuable is not what’s standing still, but what’s in motion. We need to learn to use capital as a way to measure productive capacity as a flow and not (as) a stock. Either way, the focus of value must shift from the static to the moving. In our future accumulations of surplus value and investments in production capacity, we have to get less physical. The tangible must give way to the intangible.”

Economy Lite -

What best defines the emerging diginomic economy is mobility … absolute, total freedom to move about with no strings, cords, cables or wires attached … and still be able to conduct business and our financial affairs in the same manner as we would sitting at our office desk. In fact, what makes a totally mobile diginomic world work is its pervasive attribute of intangibility. It’s what T. G. Lewis calls, the Friction-Free Economy.

“What is the Friction-Free Economy?” Lewis writes in his 1997 book by the same name. “It is responsible for the rapid rise of the Wired World (the Internet) and the unfolding of electronic manufacturing and distribution on the Internet. Now it is rapidly becoming the invisible hand that will guide millions of more businesses in the next century.”

The absence of distance and boundaries enhance the total mobility factor in a friction-free economy. No boundaries? No distance? Free-flowing economic activity unhindered by tangibility? It’s what Danny Quah, an economist in London, coined in 1998 as a “weightless economy.”

“Technology, driving economics, has the power to change the social and physical world,” writes Frances Cairncross, senior editor of The Economist, in her 2001 book, THE DEATH OF DISTANCE. In this weightless economy, Cairncross writes, “the death of distance loosens the grip of geography. Time zones and language groups, rather than mileage, will come to define distance. Barriers and borders will break down.”

It’s all about the free flow of information, which is, by nature, an intangible commodity. “We live in an information economy,” writes George Gilder, author of “TELECOSM: The World After Bandwidth Abundance.”

“When anyone can transmit any amount of information, any picture, any experience, any opportunity to anyone or everyone, anywhere, at any time, instantaneously, without barriers of convenience or cost, the resulting transformation becomes a transfiguration.”

“The barriers to the instant global spread of knowledge are falling away,” Cairncross adds. “Anyone’s bright idea can quickly become everyone’s bright idea.”

This kind of mobility, of course, entails an advanced technology infrastructure that enables users to stay connected to an ever-expanding telecommunication network. Cell phones and laptop computers are among the arsenal of the so-called Road Warrior, or telecommuter.

Approximately 4 billion people worldwide now own a cell phone. The cell phone is rapidly evolving into its own unique “one-instrument-does-all” category. Dr Nikhil Jain, chief technology advisor, for QUALCOMM (India) says: “In my view, the cell phone is becoming many different things at one time. It owns at least 50% of the pockets of the population worldwide. Compared to the PC, the ecosystem of the cell phone is much bigger. The question is what can a cell phone do? We have already seen it as a TV and soon we will see it becoming a PC and a wallet or credit card. It can also act as a connection for rural countries for services such as banking, healthcare, etc. The possibilities are immense and it gives people scope to express their creativity. There is lot of interesting things we can do with a phone depending on the requirements of the countries or communities.”

Current estimates suggest that the global cell phone population will top a staggering 5.6 billion in 2013 … in a world whose population presently stands at 6.7 billion.

Diginomic Mobility leads, naturally, to Diginomic Lifestyles where the technology of the telecommuter becomes the technology of the household.

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THE GROWTH OF TELECOMMUTING

http://students.kennesaw.edu/~nrc3725/TELECOMMUTING.htm#_THE_GROWTH_OF_TELECOMMUTING_1

The Growing Trends of Telecommuting

Approximately 20 percent of the workforce in the United States is telecommuting from home, telework center, the road, or between two cities.  In the United States, the growing rate of telecommuting is quick.

(http://www.langhoff.com/faqs.html)

With downsizing being such a big trend these days, telecommuting is a good way to improve productivity.  Telecommuting has grown at a steady 7 percent annually for the last ten years.  Approximately 32 million employees will telecommute this year.

(http://www.techweb.com/tech/mobile/20020415_mobile)

According to Workingfromanywhere.org, the 2003 American Interactive Consumer Survey found that “the number of employed Americans who work from home during the business hours at least one day per month has increased by nearly 40 percent since 2001; for the self-employed, the equivalent increase is almost 18 percent.  The report also found that 42 percent of the employee teleworkers work from home at least one day per week, and 22 percent of the employees work at home daily or nearly every day.”

(http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/pr090403.htm)  ■

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Digitizing the Economics & Lifestyle Culture of Our World

Joel Kurtzman, chairman of the Kurtzman Group, in his 1993 book, THE DEATH OF MONEY, called the new currency “megabyte money,” saying it was (and is) “an entirely new form of money based not on metal or paper, but on technology, mathematics, and science … This new megabyte money is creating a new and different world wherever it proceeds.” This former Executive Editor of Harvard Business Review and current business book reviewer for CNN, noted that “money now is different … It is no longer a thing … it is a system. Money is a network. Few people realize that money, in the traditional sense, has met its demise. Fewer still have paused to reflect on the implications of that fact.”

The “New Money Factor” of diginomics covers an extremely large spectrum to include not only the issue of currency being digitized, but every aspect of economic lifestyles today. It addresses both “how” we shop and “where” we shop. It’s how we spend our money and the electronic environments of that experience. Are we using cash, checks, and coins, or are we totally cashless? The popular yet controversial series of commercials by Visa in which the arterial flow of cashless shopping is stymied by the user of cash depicts both the reality of our times and a trend into the future.

The January 29, 2007 edition of Information Week notes that, “A generation is growing up hacking and slashing their way through virtual worlds, and they’re going to expect a 3-D, virtual interface for the rest of their online interaction.” Later, in the April issue, IW went further to say of this new generation of shoppers, “Now they want everything at Internet speed.”

The Digital Economy continues to chase the heels of the Tangible Economy (where cash has long been king throughout history), getting ever closer to parity since its inception, ever reaching for predominance. Dr. Peter Bishop, the University of Houston’s “professional futurist” professor who oversees that school’s Studies of the Future program, calls this the era of “The Intangible Society.”

In a white paper entitled The Waves of Creative Destruction: Technology Past, Present & Future, Dr. Bishop declares, “We should not call it the information society because it is more than information. It’s also communication, finance, education, entertainment. I propose instead that we call it The Intangible Society—the first industrial society to offer breakthrough productivity on purely intangible products and services.”

Don Tapscott, in his classic book, THE DIGITAL ECONOMY [© 1996, McGraw-Hill] has an equally interesting term for the new digital era: “the Age of Sand.”

“The new economy is a digital economy,” he writes. “The new age could be aptly dubbed the age of sand. The affairs of commerce, business transactions, human communications, and the insights of science are all reduced to charges on particles of silicon or racing through glass fibers, both derived from sand.”

Introduction:
What is Diginomics?
PART ONE

DIGINOMICS (dij’i-nom’iks), n. – acronym of two words: digital and economics. (1) the status of development toward an all-digital economy conducted electronically in all financial dealings between buyer and seller; a cashless society where all moneys (incl. cash, coins, checks and credit) and transactions involving the same are conducted electronically. (2) Societal trends in which the presence of and use of advanced electronic technology is both prevalent and predominant, creating lifestyles and social cultures that are technology driven. Syn. Cashless society, digital economy, friction-free economy, e-business, mobile economy, m-economy, entertainment economy, intangible economy. [1998, Wallace R. Wood, Houston TX]

For an “official” recognition of this new term, visit the Merriam-Webster On-Line Open Dictionary site.
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As far back as 1972, Robert Hendrickson, in his book entitled, The Cashless Society, observed that “according to most futurists, all that is necessary is to wait out a short term in the cycle of human history and a cashless society will inevitably befall us. The advent of a cashless society requires little from us than a moderate amount of time and patience, because this is a development that is automatic and inevitable.”

Exactly what constitutes a “moderate amount of time” is anybody’s guess at this point. Here we are in 2009 … 37 years after that prediction was published, and, for the most part, a “cashless” society does not yet exist – at least, not on the surface where we all live at the end of our work day. Nonetheless, the reality is that, save for the money in our pockets, global economics has been digitized and computerized. The “old” world of checks, coins and cash is methodically fading away. The Intangible Economy of Diginomics is maturing. All that remains are the psychological tendencies to reach for something to hold in our hands to finish a transaction.  Are we ready to make that switch?

From the perspective of “money” alone, the transformation from dependency upon tangible, old-fashioned “hard” currency that one could touch, handle and exchange, to that which is computerized, electronic digits that are transferred between computer accounts has been all but made complete in this first decade of the 21st century. The transition from “old world” currency to “new world” digital dollars has been slow and methodical, but progressive nonetheless … and noteworthy if we are to fully understand what it all means and where we are going in this transformation.
As we proceed through this series, we will look more closely at what I call the Five Pillars of Diginomics:

I. Diginomic Money
II. Diginomic Mobility
III. Diginomic Lifestyle
IV. Diginomic Globalization
V. Diginomic One World

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Wallace Wood is founder, chairman and chief executive officer of the National Space & Technology Association in Houston, Texas. Website: www.nstaworld.org.