Humour

Working with digital gypsies

T A Balasubramanian writes about the world of unfettered digital gypsies

It’s time to join another exploration with Doodh Byramji, known to friends as Doodh. The enterprising Byramji is, as we know, the perpetually curious IT research engineer from Baffle Technologies, called Baff-Tech for short.

Today, Byramji plans to probe into the mysteries of behavior when changing technology collides with puzzled humans. Doodh is sitting outdoors at a table in Quick Sip, the restaurant considered to be a hot spot by the young wired crowds notable for wearing headphones and carrying iPods. The subject facing him is the effervescent Groucho Goose, Manager, Slinky Marketing Strategy for Confusing Clients, from Duckbill & Goose.

Dear Diary (notes Byramji, as usual committing his observations to history in writing):

“We talked of ‘cloudigators’ last week—these young urban nomads who seem to dot the landscape, sailing from one WiFi spot to another, working from anywhere. And you also observed earlier that Duckbill & Goose staffers have been hooked on Twitter and the culture of micro-blogging. Does all this easy chat-as-you-run technology mean the end of the immobile desktop and the cubicle culture? Is the static office going to vanish, like the dodo?” I ask Groucho, as I sip on ginger tea.

“That’s right, Doodh,” says Groucho, sipping his latte slowly. “The idea of mobility will change everything we know about the office. We are ready to work while we wander, but it could be far more than just exchanging tweets on the fly with our project teams. Let me tell you something interesting I discovered. I was driving from Delhi to Panipat the other day when I passed by what looked like an empty field. The fact that my mobile phone stayed quiet annoyed me. Here I was, speeding by the site of one of the great historic battles of India, and nothing even vibrated. Now, tell me, would you not be thrilled to know something about this place if you going by as a tourist?”

“Hmm, that is a reason to ponder a shortcoming on your mobile service?”

“Perhaps it is much more than a shortcoming, Doodh. I have in my pocket a gizmo made by the world’s largest handset-maker. Not letting things such as Panipat slip by unnoticed is exactly what this gizmo’s service network is in business for. In fact, this handset company has spent over $ 8.1 billion to buy up a firm that collects map data around the world. What are they doing with the maps?”

“All right, so you are expecting technology to bring to you the intimate knowledge of places you are wandering through?”

“That’s right. The great advantage that your mobile phone has over your desktop PC is that it increasingly knows and cares where it is wandering with you—the owner. Some use the global positioning system (GPS), which is beamed from satellites, while others use a slightly less accurate method that works out the distances of nearby cellular towers and WiFi hotspots.”

“So how does it matter?”

“Ah, Doodh, you have evidently not traveled too much and to places you have little knowledge about. Otherwise you would see instantly that this is a huge advance.”

“OK. I have not been too far from my city and my potted plants, I agree.”

“Never mind. We now have the third element—where—that is needed to understand a wanderer’s context. The other two, of course, being ‘who’ and ‘when.’ Most clearly, this means that the idea of being lost will become obsolete—and it would let people become more immersed in the real world around—so I would be told all about Panipat when I am actually there in the flesh—rather than reading about it in a history book. Maybe that is a trivial thing—but just think of where you can take this—knowledge of presence, especially if you are living in a world of unfettered digital gypsies.”

“That would be freewheeling gypsies—made more easily so—by the reach of their digital gadgets?”

“Exactly—you can now afford to roam because you can make connections in a snap, Doodh. If you recall, when they first arrived, mobile phones were fidgety instruments used almost exclusively for voice calls. They were devilishly hard to hook up to the Internet and even to your computers. Notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) needed messy cables to go online—and even then, they were annoyingly slow. Getting your email on a mobile phone—not to mention synchronizing it across several gizmos—was a dream. You took pictures with cameras and film. There were gadgets, but they did everything in solo acts.”

“So what has happened to change things around?”

“Omnipresence! The featherweight mobile phone is all set to knock down your heavy desktop PC as the primary device for getting online. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 3.3 billion people—more than half the world’s population—now subscribe to a mobile-phone service, so the Internet at last looks set to change the whole world into a gypsy camp.”

“To come back to my question—does it mean the end of the fixed location workplace and the associated office culture?”

“I can tell you what we have noticed in Duckbill & Goose, which, as you know, has been a bastion of formal office-going tradition—with a brick-and-mortar structure that looks as though it was built to last forever. We are having fewer and fewer ‘flesh meetings’. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom of the past few decades, which held that improvements in telecommunications always lead to more physical travel, rather than less. I used to spend two weeks a month traveling to meet customers; that has come down to less than one week a month. With more than 200 clients, I find that I communicate far more efficiently through my blog, which is translated into 6 languages and zips into the e-mail boxes of 5,000 people. When I travel, it is now largely for cultural reasons. My Indian clients, in particular, still find coffee sessions reassuring.”

“So there is still hope for the physical meeting-place?”

“Not for too long, I presume. Gypsy life requires big adjustments in the work culture that we have grown up with. The fussy older and more crusty partners at Duckbill & Goose generally oppose the idea because they fear that they cannot manage people whom they cannot see face-to-face. But with time and a little persuasion, they do change—they let go of the face time compulsion”.

“And what do you see happening next?”

“The relentless march of web services like WiFi and now, cloud computing on demand. I can tell you that within a few years, for example, your omnipresent mobile assistant will know where you are at what time, and where you are going next, based on your electronic diary. The little digital marvel may also know, from your address book, that you have a friend in the building whose diary says that he is going to the same place. Your two phones will alert you so that you can share a taxi.”

“All this ceaseless access to me would wear me down, Groucho. What if I need a break?”

“No problemo. If you are not feeling very sociable that day, you can always switch off the pesky gizmo and claim that your battery died. To preserve your sanity, you can always step in to play The Terminator, even in a global economy on a flat world.”