This blog post will build on what was stated in my previous blog plost:

We – the digital people – are now intimate with our technology and therefore it influences our behavior on an unconscious level.

Building on that, I will try to explain the consequences of another statement from my previous blog post:

We are always online.

At first sight, it appears that new technologies has given us the gift of freedom, by allowing us to transcend our spatial (I’ve always wanted to use that word – it really just means “space) boundaries.
BUT what Søren Schultz found in his research, was that we feel something very different from freedom. Instead of feeling free, we feel a need or an obligation to always be available. We have to be available –> because people expect us to be availiable –> because we are now able to always be available.

When the new technology freed us from the constraints of space it  bound us to the constraints of time instead. Schultz named this phenomenon time dependence.

When I first read about this I was quite suprised, because I could relate to the feeling described in the words time dependence. It is the feeling I get everytime I am in class and my iPhone vibrates. It’s the feeling I get when I am having a conversation and my iPhone vibrates.

I know I am not supposed to check it, but I want to.

The conclusion of this blog post is the same as the last one:
As an eMarketer you need to be careful not to overextend when you post things online or send out e-mails because, in many cases, you may be poking the always-available-people in real life!

Now we are moving on to some of the really interesting stuff. It has do to with the second of the three characteristics that Søren Schultz found in his research on the digital natives:

“We are now intimate with our primary technologies”

What does that mean? That means that we ,in many cases, need to stop thinking about technologies as tools at our disposal but as something that influences our behaviour in a complex manner.

Lets use the iPhone as an example of this.

Søren Schultz asked people if their iPhones had sound toggled on or off, and people below the age of 30 answered that it was always turned off. The answer to why people had the sound toggled of, was that they always had their iPhone with them – always – and they had the vibrator on, so they would notice the call or text anyway.

The essence of this is that the iPhone is not something we think about bringing along anymore, it’s not something we think about using – we just do it by instinct.

When we stop reflecting on why and how we are using the iPhone, then the iPhone starts to influence our behavior and way of thinking. As McLuhan once wrote it “the technology becomes an extension of the human being”.

Another example of this, is the function in the Facebook message-tool which enables you to see, when the other party has read your message. Don’t tell me that it hasn’t made you answer the message faster?

I believe that we need to take account of the way that we have become more intimate with our techonology. It means that we – as eMarketers – can almost always reach our target audience through e-mails or any social media, because it goes straight to their Smartphones. And they always bring their Smartphones along.

BUT that also means that we can easily overextend. When we think that we are pushing something through a public channel, such as social media, we are actually poking (the Smartphone vibrator) people in real life – because people are always online and they don’t want to be offline. From that follows that they cannot turn the digital messages off, as they could with the TV-commercials!

Therefore is their no such thing as a good, old-fashioned digital mass media and that has made the process of reaching reaching people much more complex.

In my last blog post I wrote about the digital people and three characteristics that describe these people in the way they behave and construct their identity in this new digital world.

This blog post is devoted to the first characteristic – one of the most interesting findings in Søren Schultz’s research. That is, that we have lost control of our own “image” in this new digital world and that has changed the way we act and think.

Back in the days a great thinker, Erving Goffman, argued that human interactions could be described through dramaturgical terminology. If we simplify his theory it’s like this: We had a (privat) backstage where we displayed our “true” identity and where we could rehearse our act so that we were ready to act in the front stage (public).
Our identity was private by default.

The thing that Søren Schultz states now is that we don’t have a back stage anymore or not even something in between. With the emergence of social media and the new technology everything has become public by default. You don’t know when someone is going tell something about you in a Facebook post or a tweet. You don’t know when someone is going to take a picture of you – because (almost) everyone carries a sort of camera now a days!

– A small test to prove the point: How many of the pictures of you on Facebook have you have you uploaded? I think I have uploaded 5% of the pictures I am in. And I am guessing it’s the same for you?

We have lost control!

Identity has moved away from being a more static and private thing into being a process that plays out in public. When you cannot control WHAT your identity is and how other portrays it, the only thing left is  to control HOW you react to your identity.

And this applies to businesses as well! You cannot do a traditional one-way-push-celebrity-endorsement-we-gonna-tell-you-what-we-are-CAMPAIGN anymore. Because you do not own the right to portray your company’s identity – everyone does and everyone can!

From my point of view, two things follow from this:

1. Stop thinking that you are in control and start taking others saying about you serious – that goes for companies as well as private persons.
2. Instead of telling me (the customer) about you (the business) in an absolute and transmissional way, you need to give me the tools for me to start a dialogue about or with you. Because I want to do that: When I start a dialogue about your business it gives you or my friends the tools to portray my identity in a way that i want it.

It can suddenly turn into a positive spiral.

Today my E-Marketing professor, Julio Visko, walked the class through the different stages of relationships between a customer and a brand. The second stage is called “intimate relationships” and that thing – right there – really got me thinking.

In an everyday context an intimate relationship is something that is build on elements such as trust, loyalty and positive, shared experiences. In simple words, both parties know each other, understand each other, and to me that is exactly what the second stage of customer-brand relationships is about.

BUT my big question is: Do we really know who we are dealing with? Do we know who these “digital people” are – the ones that are using all the new technology?

While studying in the interdisciplinary programme “Business Adm. & Corporate Communication” I have learned a lot about segmentation, marketing, communication plans and so forth. But from my point of view it’s crucial to understand the sociological perspective on the digital, as the digital expert Brian Solis also argues in his book “Engage”. We need to understand the digital people before we can carry out the marketing projects and build intimate relationships with them!

So, who are we dealing with?

Søren Schultz, professor at Copenhagen Business School, has offered an interesting perspective on this subject. He argues that the new technologies and social media have dramatically changed our behavior and the way we construct our identity. Drawing on Goffman and McLuhan he explains how his research finds that:

1. We have lost control of our own “image” to such a degree that what once played out back stage or in the middle region is now happening front stage. Everything is public – and that goes for brands as well.
2. We have become intimate with the new technology in the  way that McLuhan argued when he wrote that a technology becomes an extension of the person that uses it.
3. The new techonology has brought along a new form of dependence. We have transcended the constraints of time and space but that means that we are now supposed to be available at all times. You could say that we are in some way dependent on time.

Now you’re maybe thinking: “Well, that sounds like some pretty dramatic and yet quick conlusions” – but fear not. I will devote my next 3 blog post to elaborate on the subject of “who we are dealing with” and the thoughts and research behind these findings. Because to me, that is absolutely crucial.

/Marcus Feldthus

I am looking forward to write my first post and I can tell you “world”, it is going to be in the near future!