Not everything goes online

In times of limited relationships, the limits of virtual interactions are even more obvious.

Who has never used the phrase – now with enthusiasm, now with a certain melancholy – ‘now everything is on the internet’? In fact, we knew that not everything and especially not everyone is online. This was one of the motivations of one of the IRIS research projects, which resulted in three books on digital inclusion. All available here. When we talk about digitally fulfilling our tasks, work, and family relationships, consuming, providing and receiving services, selling and buying, among many other dimensions, we speak to just a part of the population in Brazil and in the world that has these options. This leads us to an important assumption, in fact, essential: there is an overwhelming inequality in this ‘new normal’, which reinforces economic, social, cultural, and historical imbalances. These, in turn, have nothing new.

Even for those who have these (and other) privileges, the extension of the recommended period of social distance shows the limitations of migration to digital interfaces. We come to understand that ‘everything on the internet’ is more for a pamphlet than for real in society. The importance of the internet grows, without a doubt. Working for it to reach more people, in a safe, and a positive way becomes an increasingly essential commitment. And recognizing the other layers and intersections of our human interactions is urgent.

Every solution has a problem

You can have the best training, have read the main references in management, project management, human resources, crises, and strategy. You can even have years of leadership experience and face any disaster. But if you tell me that you are pretty prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic scenarios, I can only conclude that you are not living in 2020 (if you are in the future, please accept spoilers for the current season, please).

For a while, we have been talking about organizational culture, values, empathy, and vulnerability also in the professional environment. As more automation takes place in different sectors of the economy, more space requires our humanity. Fear, anxiety, mourning, trust, hope, and overcoming do not go through platforms and tools connected to the internet. The emotional dimension needs to enter the equation for decision making so that they can effectively face the difficulties of the external context. You have to feel to make sense.

It is much harder to pay attention to this dimension from a distance. Impossible? No. We discovered a variety of calling services and even optimized a variety of activities. We have the chance to participate remotely in opportunities that, in person, would not be accessible. But the home office also leaves us without handshakes, hugs, spontaneous reactions, living with other ways of living. That is why, although it is only possible because we have the privilege to act from our homes, for the services and applications that operate on the internet, much of what we need – more than ever – is not digital.

We cannot assume the logic about just transferring our activities, objectives, and goals to the platform, the application, or the web page. Hence a second point: coexistence – and what it builds in us daily – is not transmitted by cables, fibers, servers, and devices. As long as we don’t recognize this and understand the limitations of the many promises that ‘digital solutions’ offer, they will become the problem. Or at least much of it, as to ignore what unites us as a feeling is to undermine our potential as an action.

Believe to see

Acting, in turn, begins by admitting the complexity of this equation: there is exhaustion, there is saturation with technological interfaces, shared spaces, demands from children and the elderly, concerns about safety, acquaintances infected by a disease that overwhelmed the world. This skein of demands gains layers of complexity as time goes by, increases in size, hinders our vision.

In this context, migrating activities, services, relationships, and meanings to digital interfaces seems like a solution. Perhaps the only possible one, when and for whom it is possible. We must admit, however, that not everything will work. So, there is also a complex exercise to analyze if we should follow the trend of migration to digital or, in fact, design specific arrangements for these interfaces. It is new, it is complex, and it may even be full of good intentions. It turns out that not everything goes online, and we need to consider the limitations, in addition to the structural and social ones, represented by a dynamic that insists on denying its weaknesses.

It is necessary to see that some things, systems, methodologies, and processes have lost their meaning. It may be that they lost it a long time ago and the current situation has only shown that. Or not, they may have a sense again, someday. Through technologies or not, we are changing forever. On this road, we can recognize what cannot be maintained, be moved by what surrounds us, dare to admit change. The essential, in this case, is visible to the eyes and is on the other side of this screen: it is, humanly, us.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.
Illustration by Freepik Stories