Much of the good digital stuff is invisible. Strange thing to say when you think of the prevalence of digital throughout consumer and service sectors.
What I mean by “invisible” is that the bulk of digital applications are integrated into infrastructure, production, services, education, healthcare, transport, etc. But the digital stuff we’re constantly being told to pay attention to is the stuff that we use and see everyday — consumer hardware, social media, e-entertainment, eservices, e-etc.
It’s an upside down picture and it’s time to put it the right way up because, as in other sectors, the imbalance is bound to skew social and production priorities and obstruct inventiveness, innovation, productivity, etc. (The focus on consumer products is increasingly employing a lot of very talented people in jobs that are totally pointless, depressing the hell out of them.)
How did it get that way? Company focus on yearly increases in returns has put marketing departments under massive pressure to increase sales. The focus of marketing on consumer products has successfully drawn attention and production resources towards consumer products that are redundant to begin with and/or immediately superseded.
But that stuff — social media, mobile gaming, emusic, ebooks — is a tiny part of the really big and exciting picture. Some of it’s useful, I’m not disputing that, but quietly, in the real activity of everyday life, people are doing what humanity’s good at — raising the standard of living — by using digital: education, healthcare, science, production, transport, infrastructure applications. They need more resources.
These things are worth the effort even if they don’t immediately show a useful application or ROI. Sometimes things don’t ever show direct social or financial return but the fact that something’s been tried (even if it’s “failed”) has its own value.
As people working in digital, we need to make the case for refocusing our attention, skills and time away from consumer product marketing, and the methods of doing it (i.e. the distribution pipelines, aka, digital channels); away from developing new digital products (hardware, software, interaction) that are forced into immediate obselence. We need to argue for another focus — the reason why we’re developing digital applications in the first place: to improve our everyday lives; to make things work better; for economic growth; to raise the standard of living. I am not there for the machine; it’s there for me.
That’s not easy. Companies these days are reluctant to invest, especially in anything that doesn’t show an immediate return. That wasn’t always true. In the post WWII period 70% of corporate profits in the USA were reinvested. Such resources are, now, distributed to shareholders or simply do nothing (See FT.com article, Don’t expect economic boost from cash-rich companies FT.com, 3 Jan 2012). And asking corporate employees, product managers and digital agencies to try to refocus a company’s goals may be too big an ask. Yet we must demand a change in focus and investment towards work that has tangible benefits because the alternative — stagnation — is bleak.
