There is a meme doing the rounds, a simple image of text, arranged as a question with multiple-choice answers. It reads: “Who led the digital transformation of your company? A) CEO B) CTO or C) Covid-19.” Covid-19 is circled. Despite talk about digital readiness for decades, it took this novel coronavirus three months or so to completely change the world, prepared or not.
Knowledge workers, with the exception of those on the front line, are working from home wherever possible. Many firms have had to scramble, and many more to fundamentally rethink what productivity looks like when you’re judged on output and not proximity. If you’re a people manager inclined to clock watch and micromanage, you’re probably in a hell of your own making right now. We talk about the need for businesses to be agile, to respond quickly as conditions change, but this situation is proving the point that agility is a people thing as much as it is a systems thing.
Netflix and other streaming consumption is through the roof, but so is the user-base growth of services such as Zoom and Houseparty, which have grown exponentially. It underlines the idea that whether it is at work or for social, people want and need face-to-face interaction. Incidentally, The New York Times has done a great feature on how our internet use has changed in response to the virus, so if graphs and stats are your thing I highly recommend it.
Many labour-heavy industries locally have been resistant to mechanisation and automation in particular, for obvious and utterly understandable reasons. No-one wants to be in charge of the shift that sends millions of unskilled workers back to a state of unemployed despair, especially not in a country with inequality of gargantuan proportions. Now, as reported in Business Day on Monday, the Minerals Council SA is issuing dire warnings for the mining industry and its workers if we don’t see a return to work at the end of the 21-day national lockdown.
Was there a way for us to shift towards automation, to retrain workers en masse before this, that could have limited damage? Australia and Canada, with their extensive social welfare, decided it needed doing. Could we have? Should we be asking the same questions about digital transformation of schooling, or why internet access has been so tremendously slow to penetrate beyond the urban middle class?
To be clear, I do not intend to be flippant about lives and incomes. Real people are dying of Covid-19 and many more just-as-real people will die from the broader effects of Covid-19, which in some countries will include preventable starvation. Many entrepreneurs are also living on a knife’s edge as a result, and the billionaires’ funds and loans won’t be able to save them all. Obviously, inequality and social woes existed before this, but the pandemic is showing them to us in undeniable technicolour right now.
And that other scourge of digital — fake news — is now a punishable offence (as I wrote last week), and we’re starting to see it play out in real life. YouTube and Facebook are taking bold steps to shut down disinformation. Yesterday, Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) announced an interesting shift: if you want to forward a message that has been already forwarded five or more times you will be able to do so only one contact at a time. This is a further restriction of last year’s “five-contacts” limit.
Messaging services such as Whatsapp and Messenger are considered “dark social” in that we cannot see what is being said within them, compared with Twitter, which is inherently public. It’s hard to counter or even respond to fake news on dark social, because you cannot even assess the claims therein. So Whatsapp’s decision to restrict highly forwarded media is the digital equivalent of social distancing. It’s not a cure, but it will probably go a long way towards slowing down the spread of what the World Health Organisation is now calling an infodemic.
In my sole schadenfreude moment of the week, the earbud-in-nose guy, who created a fake viral video about contaminated Covid-19 tests in SA, was arrested. I don’t make a habit of enjoying other people’s misfortune, but we’re all locked in our houses so I let myself have this one as a lockdown treat.
Whether these changes will be long-term or not (hell, whether the pandemic will be long-term or not) is a matter of debate, but for now the changes to our daily lives have been swift and profound, with many technology firms emerging as new potential superpowers.
I am looking forward to writing on anything else, as much as you’re looking forward to reading about it, but in the midst of the pandemic we must choose what elements of our new lives we want to keep and what we can’t wait to throw in the bin with our face masks when they’ve served their purpose.
• Thompson Ferreira is a freelance journalist, impactAFRICA fellow, and WanaData member.
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