Virtual and real are the same
+8* ThoughtsPublished November 16, 2007 at 6:05 pm 1 CommentIn the past two weeks we did two separate presentations:
- “E-Commerce as Crucial Success factor for Economic Growth and Development” at the EU-China Information Society Workshop involving the Ministry of Information Industry and the Ministry of Commerce
- “Web 2.0 success stories from Asia” (available here)
They might sound like two totally different topics but we found they had a very common point:
They showed how STUCK people are in definitions.
Let’s explain this a bit for the e-commerce part
People think of e-commerce as “shopping with Internet”. What we think is that online commerce and offline commerce are essentially the same thing: commerce. This sounds like a truism but is far from simple.
- First, where do you discover the products?
- How do you come to trust an online shop (certificates? reviews? long-time presence?)?
- How do you order? (internet? email? phone call?)
- How do you pay? (online? offline?)
The only critical difference we found is that Internet offers less trust cues, but that’s it. TRUST is key to the development of e-commerce, all the rest is gardening work to enable this trust.
So where are we stuck? We are stuck in that we separate online and offline because we stopped asking ourselves questions about offline commerce as we assume trust. Interestingly, people assume much less trust in China, as things move fast, scams abound, and sellers tend to disappear overnight.
So how does that relate to virtual stuff?
Simple: again, people are stuck! At OrangeLabs’ seminar on Web 2.0 in China, it was very tangible that some people are not comfortable with online life. Honestly, I feel kids do not ask themselves much questions about it: it’s just life!
Because someone got the great idea to use the word “virtual” for anything involving digital, people think virtual equals not real. Harry meets Sally online: her avatar is digital, but the person behind it is totally real, and so is the connection he’s having with her, and when they meet again “offline”, it is not more “real”, it is more “analog”.
So it seems we have a problem with the words “virtual” and “real”.
One solution we see is to encourage to use “digital” and “analog” instead. It has the additional advantage to make “face-to-face” sound a bit outdated, which will in turn rebalance and eventually merge the two: virtual and real are the same in essence, but you can do things online or offline, in a digital or analog way.
This might even make “analog” become trendy again, as people want to deal with sensations that you tend to forget online ^_^ When you listen to so much music online, you become more interested in the offline “experience” like a concert.
To conclude, an interesting example to conclude, from online communities and 3G expert Tomi Ahonen‘s blog:
From Virtual to Real: online football fans buy up a team and get real
A “real” soccer team becomes an offline extension of “Pro Evolution Soccer” ;-)
Is that more or less “real” than “offline” soccer team management?
So here are a couple of equations we would like to promote:
e-commerce + o-commerce = commerce
digital + analog = life
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