Unmuting the world, from zero to one

AN INTENSE PERIOD PRESENTING US WITH A NEW REALITY

Imagine … it’s one year past Corona-time, a year with both scary and joyful parts. While looking back we realized that many things have changed rapidly through that one global event triggered and dominated by COVID-19. With impact professionally and in our very own social circles.

The – what is going to be dominating – words of 2021 start from the letter V, the V for vaccine, and the V for victory. Now … a de-masked winter day in 2021 … it is a norm for international travelers to get vaccinated before boarding a plane. After a turbulent period of force-developing vaccines and large scale deployments of them it is now a proven and accepted way to protect people, for the sake of everyone’s health.

The vaccine indeed helps society to get back into some kind of normal.

And what else has reshuffled the 2020-chaos into a new order in 2021?

WORKING FROM HOME, INFAMOUSLY POPULAR

Working from home is a rational alternative when a flare-up of infection happens in town. Virtual tools and meetings have permeated into daily life to share ideas, post images, review proposals and make business decisions. There is just hardly anything that cannot be done virtually. Seeing each other through camera becomes a habit for students while studying, for professionals while working, and for friends who just want to chit chat.

“Hey, you are muted.”, “Wait, we can’t hear you, can you unmute first?”, “She is muted, someone send her a message please?”, “He is not on Teams now, do you have his WeChat?”. These fill in the conversations in virtual meetings. Unexpected inconvenience in our workspace, caused by COVID-19, but unexpectedly jolly as well … as can be seen in the hilarious example of conference call bingo | link.

Working from home taps into another type of routine that we have to master ourselves, like finding the right balance between pure focus and intense distraction. To not alienate from each other we just have to interact with each other through any channel there is within an arm’s reach. In there the digital bridge is becoming more and more essential. Social distancing should never convert into social alienation, means we have to create the opportunity to exchange information, voice opinion, and express emotions. The unmuted communication reveals that communication through screens causes uncertainty because you are not always sure of the effectiveness of your message. In many situations body language supports messaging, as an essential layer in communication, and currently mostly with the lack of that which just is difficult.

Reading tip: "Lessons from the pandemic: tips from eight productive people"

SIMPLY WITH OUR EYES WIDE OPEN

No one would forget 2020, when the advent of COVID-19 brought unprecedented changes in life and work in this century. Corona-refugee, to some degree, is a coined word to give a description of the fragility of human beings. It felt like if we as civilized people in a modern world got set back many years in our evolution. Limitations in social life, traveling (air traffic NL link | air traffic CN link), going from A to B via public transport (-49%), commuting in general (-32%), going out, making fun and socialize, celebrating life events with friends and family, working … as a corona-refugee we got to ‘learn’ to not do things, this has been a huge game changer. We literally have learnt to be bound to the house (+12%) | link.

Due to that massive turnaround, people’s behavior has been changing drastically, where we were used to travel a few hours to be on the other side of the globe we can only move around domestically or regionally. Partly as per instruction of authorities to stay in control of the virus, but we have also recognized and accepted again to enjoy the beauty of our own coastal area and mountain scenery. Restaurants, tourism, and recreational businesses have been affected with obvious business decline. Subway, airport, cinema and even door knobs have been risky spots to pay attention to. Geographical locations are seen as bubbles in which the virus is contained, as soon as positive cases are identified local containment is initiated. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) loss and unemployment data headline the media before vaccine prevalence. According to the Economist data in December 2020 (link), World economic output is at least 7% lower than it would otherwise have been, the biggest slump since the Second World War. And here is a chart dating back to 14th December 2020 showing some countries’ GDP growth figures | link. 

Were our eyes somehow forced to open up?

Well, it at least encouraged us to stay connected digitally, through social platforms, phone or video calls, we had to unmute ourselves in ways we were not used to before, professionally, privately, basically in any circumstance …

NOT ALL HER?ES WEAR CAPES

Music synchronizes body and brain and let's people bond, it lightens pain and gives hope. On 10th February 2020, a video of patients dancing at the modular Huoshenshan – Mount Fire God – hospital in Wuhan China was spreading broadly on internet. In the video, the patients and clinicians were dancing around the hospital beds with cheerful music | link.

The optimistic attitude during the pandemic resonated broadly with Chinese – and also Dutch – netizens at the pressing times. And to show that people unmute themselves towards others can be seen in the touching video of people in large apartment buildings who were cheering “hang on and be strong” (加油, jiāyóu) towards each other to provide strength and encourage each other to persevere until the arrival of better times | link.

Next to music, also movies serve as a beacon of hope; in the example of “not all heroes wear capes”, a message on large self-fabricated banners created by football fans and placed close to hospital locations or hotspots were large amounts of people pass by. For the one reason to pay great respect to the endless amounts of dedication and devotion the staff and clinicians showed to just make people better again | link.

EMOJI AS THE SUNRAY IN A STORM OF DIGITAL MADNESS ツ

In the social media era, people are constantly looking at illuminating cellphone screens, this colors our daily life experience. It chimes with the data from the internet which reflects that the average time spent on social media in 2019 and 2020 was almost 2.5 hours per day | link.

In pandemic times, face-to-face meetings are difficult to arrange, and if so they should be held on an arm’s length basis. Digitalization helps us to send and receive messages in a faster way. However, the emotional character of a message is a given in human being’s social communication. Emoji, as a new agent, is applied to bridge this gap. When people chat online in private life or business, the response cannot always be either spontaneous or synchronized. Emoji can be a handy language to serve people’s communication need. Embodying the creative humor, emoji also helps people to express care using all sorts of fun and touching signs. Just anyone can relate! A study shows that 92% of smartphone users sends a message using emoji, the visual language which actually originates from Japan | link. 

Emoji can be everywhere. On 25th November 2020, a residential community with over 6.000 residents named Ming Tian Hua Cheng in Shanghai was found with two Covid-19 infectious cases and the entire community was locked down for two weeks. During the 14 lock down days, compelling stories about people care about each other headlined the local newspaper in Shanghai. Before the lock down measures were lifted, residents jointly used household lights to form a giant "the heart to tomorrow”, airing the courage and bond | link.

TECHNOLOGY, BOTH ENABLER & DESTRUCTOR

Limitations in our social lives bring weariness. Unmuting and altering the sameness of sentiment in pandemic times is enabled by technology. Technology has been a big influencing factor throughout this challenging time which literally everyone on the globe has been witnessing from the first person perspective. There are different ways to look at it. It has been both an enabler and a destructor of the comfortable lives that people were living back in the days. 

1) ENABLER

A quite technical revolution took place on a scale that nobody had ever seen before. Bringing products and services to individuals has been boosted, with personal experiences literally served at the people’s fingertips. Public services and commercial enterprises had to find ways to survive, they had to shift their business models and reinvent customer engagement. The pandemic has conditioned the digital acceleration in China. In the Netherlands the adoption of digital is gaining more traction after having established a solid foundation for a digital ecosystem over the past years.

These times were a catalyst for digital adoption, it triggered digital transformation and acceleration more than ever. Not only on society or corporate levels, the big change also happened on local geographical and small size company levels. Of course, big enterprises had to find ways to really stay connected with the individual customer to not lose ground or market share. The necessity to survive as a local shop or restaurant owner unleashed many new variations of offering services and products, through renovating existing business models, or inventing new digital wheels, in the backdrop of social distancing measurements.

With democratization of digital technology, we communicate through land lines, telephones, computers, and smartphones. With parallel advances in computing power enhancement and decreasing cost, amid the pandemic and social distancing, applications facilitating remote conferences, working, teaching, learning, diagnosing and treating have accelerated the progress with an exponential growth observed in the number of such use cases in China and the Netherlands. As people’s digital footprint deepens, it has unveiled the pattern behind it and given further validation opportunity to optimize the user experience. In the process of decoding the new needs from both consumer-end and social distancing, a bunch of novel digital applications has appeared at a large scale, such as “facial recognition with the mask”, “omnipotent robots in delivery services”, etc.

This has also been put in practice to some extent in the Netherlands for e.g. grocery shopping. The automation technology has simplified the shopping process, also with sympathy for vulnerable generations. Here also mindset comes into play, for example senior citizens are given the opportunity to be in a store during a dedicated timeslot. To limit the risk of infection, to provide proper moving space and also to just pay the appropriate respect to these people.

Another area which is having long lasting affect is education. Harvesting the information technology infrastructure upgrading, hardware and software development, the “virtual classroom” has become common practice in remote education in both China and in the Netherlands. Since many Chinese and Dutch students are blocked from travelling, it is prohibited to come to school and as a precaution the schools closed their doors. Teachers in China, the Netherlands and further abroad have found it relatively easier to deliver courses at home than in class rooms. Technology makes the “give” easier but a question mark remains on the “take” from students' side, this could tell us that the new version of the education system is arriving much faster than we can absorb properly, this will take time. Meanwhile, gamification continues to play a bigger role to support the atmosphere in the class, including the use of emoji and quiz like platforms such as Kahoot.it and Menti.com.

A consequence of the various lockdowns is that the retail sector – mostly grocery and food related – is speeding up the transition towards online shopping, globally. In the first half of 2020 online grocery sales grew 100%, the number of active online users increased with 200%. This will, for the biggest part, have a permanent character | link.

2) DESTRUCTOR

Technology can unburden and simplify our lives. But it also distances us from having in-person interactions, especially during the pandemic outbreak and subsequent lockdowns everywhere. With digital applications on the rise and products and services at everyone’s fingertips another vital paradigm surfaces specifically linked to Covid-19. People face psychological and physical challenges as the line between personal and professional space is blurring. This remote versus non-remote work balance, or the lack of it, has to be addressed carefully and thoroughly, with in this process a key role for employers. Employees cannot simply rely anymore on physical separation of work versus non-work locations. This change impacts professional productivity, people’s stress levels and resets the work versus home responsibilities.

We have put those previous patterns in the trash bin and start embracing new ones. While doing so we are confronted with the literal interpretation of FOMO, which is an acronym for ‘fear of missing out’ and describes digital and physical experiences which people unintentionally cannot be part of. Physically because things are just not possible due to the small social bubble. But also the overwhelming information flow being pushed towards us via all the digital channels there are. That boosts the fear of missing out, not necessarily because you want to be part of this or that, it is largely due to the inability of catching up on everything relating to you online.

The other side effect of using digital technology, to some degree, has surfaced among specific demographic groups such as senior citizens. Previous cited case of “no-contact” design in the section of “technology as enabler”, was quickly implemented at public spaces such as libraries. E.g. in Shanghai at times an upgrade took place, towards a new state-of-the-art book lending system; the effort was made solely for the purpose to be more digital and avoid physical interaction between visitor and device. A prerequisite for users was to install a new mini-app for WeChat. Sometimes, for a part of the Chinese senior citizens, it caused a hurdle for borrowing books because they got used to using the IC card (a card with chip). This problem was later solved with the solution of having a special service window open with dedicated staff. This is a step further to address digital dividend between generations with empathy and pragmatism. From 2020 through to 2021, the hurdle to senior citizens in similar situations has been largely improved in China. The sympathetic approach like this has been implemented in many other places to cushion any side effect from using digital technology.

UNMUTING ACROSS GEOGRAPHIES

Here are a some practical highlights which we come across in our daily lives, seen from our two geographical backgrounds. 

China, 1.4 Billion people (18.5% of the world population), 9.597.000 km2.

The digital economy in China has been through fast-paced development for 20 years since the birth of e-commerce. This has also catalyzed the recovery of the economy amid Covid-19. The existing 24/7 ordering and delivery platforms through which one can purchase nearly anything ensured the household supply without a break. The established digital ecosystem has been contributing to the resilience of the country’s economy. According to the "China Internet Development Report 2019", in 2018, China's digital economy reached 31.3 trillion yuan, accounting for 34.8% of the GDP. The digital economy has become a new engine for China's economic growth. In the pandemic, the digital economy plays an infrastructure role to household supply and economy recovery. More online shops made most of the opportunity to launch a "supermarket" model to meet the ever extending consumer needs. Service functionality expands to online payment, loans, social media, messaging, and live broadcast etc. Digitalized business woven into brick-and-mortar stores underlines China’s new retail system. It is conceivable that it won’t be taking too long until China becomes a cashless country with a full-fledged e-commerce and e-service system.

In China, social vitality has resumed since the second half of 2020. The online study, work and business has become part of life. What is the next digital turning point? Does this mean that we could do everything on a computer or cellphone soon? Not yet. IBM published an article in 2012 on the disruptive subject: “computers to have 5 senses in 2018”. Well, it is assumed to partially become reality in China by December 2021 | link.

The Netherlands, 17 million people (0.22% of the world population), 41.543 km2, part of the European Union.

For the past decade the Netherlands has been working actively on their digital footprint. By crafting a foundation through which society, business and public services are able to reach people directly, personally.

In the Netherlands we have seen a boost in a variety of companies – from large corporates to small size family businesses – that found their way to the digital platforms and marketplaces. Capabilities like direct-to-consumer commerce channels, personalized experiences and artificial intelligence were already up for a seamless integration. A lot of businesses recently took a brave leap of faith with expanding their business models by plugging their model in into the digital ecosystem and its variety of touchpoints. And during these tough times there was some support from the government to limit the economical hit.

Compared to China, the digital maturity in the Netherlands still feels quite conservative. We experience an acceleration of the adoption into our digital life. Where in China the experiences using all of the digital touch points is accelerating and scaling rapidly. In the Netherlands e.g. the bigger supermarket chains are establishing their own platforms through which home delivery is made available, with their own delivery vehicles and pick-up points. There is also a modest growth in number of platforms through which meals from different places can be ordered, though it will surely take some time before there are 24/7 ordering- and delivery possibilities, not to mention cashless stores.

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, some business owners established quite the opposite of what they have originally intended to start their entrepreneurship with. Adhering to the 1.5 m society, allowing people to wear face masks or even temporary closure of places. We had to distance ourselves from the social comfort zones we were used to live in, businesses and enterprises had to adapt big time to continue to at least making some money. With as a consequence adjusting product or service. 

the INDIVIDUAL | and commonalities cross-geography

Rising individual independence and collaborative way of working is the common ground between two countries after the pandemic. Social presence of the individual human being has never been this important – strongly linked to the 'fear of missing out' – this is a paramount part of the equation. People proactively stay connected in their social lives and work. Rising social interaction, prevailing online consumerism and new generation’s given-digital-savvy character are all shaping the society and pivoting with an unmuted process since the pandemic time.

In addition, the pandemic is an opportunity for people to reflect their lives and the environmental challenge on this planet. Green products consumption become a lifestyle-of-choice among citizens around the world. In China, the harmonious coexistence of nature and human society is encouraged in the construction of ecological civilization. The sharing economy boosts the quality of life while minimizing resource consumption and pollution emissions, and advocates green and moderate consumption. The Netherlands has a leading position in environment protection worldwide.

In the recently announced 2020 Sustainable Brand Index? report, the Netherlands is one of the countries where consumers' actual purchasing decisions are most affected by the concept of sustainable development (79%) | link.

CONCLUSION: UNMUTING IN UNCERTAINTY

A renewed meaning has been given to the world league of being a human being, shirt sponsored by a random – though far-reaching – event of nothing less than a pandemic. And this pandemic has been beating us humans up a bit. This sounds rather dramatic, which is exactly how it should sound, the concept of unmuting happened throughout anyone’s private and professional life. It alters the sentimental sameness people had in Covid-19. New product and service related concepts unfolded and we have all taken an exam in a modern class of a lot of new lessons learned. It proved that human beings are the most fragile of all, we aren’t just as strong as we think even though our primal instinct is called survival. It opened up our eyes in a little bit of a bizarre way. Different regions have a different momentum towards anticipating that pressing situation. Difference in culture and habits, difference in materializing innovation, and most importantly difference in our individual existence, health and well-being. The impact should not be underestimated, the key thing that we have to both accept as embrace is that we have to learn from each other and jointly challenge the status quo.

All in all we are encouraged to stay connected digitally, through social platforms, phone or video calls. New engagement surfaces with people’s creativity, authenticity, and care for each other. A new economy emerges in novel shape. We had to unmute ourselves in ways we were not used to experience before, professionally, privately, just everywhere. And through this article with a joint practical view from two different geographies. We remain optimistic about the very recent years of the 21st century despite the start with pain and misery. It has been proven that people’s inner strength has risen and adapted to this pandemic and entailing change. We are in good shape, although it does not always seem like it today.

Many thanks for taking the time to read, 谢谢

THE AUTHORS

Two perspectives on the new unmuted reality we are finding ourselves in today. Lauren (LinkedIn), a lifelong learner with creative mind and a seasoned communication professional living in the city of Shanghai. Olaf (LinkedIn), a hybrid of business management and digital savviness, curious of cross-cultural exploration, and a challenger of the status-quo based out of the Netherlands. This article is a first attempt to co-author from out of the two countries covering the share of relevant insights and practicalities during pandemic times.

By publishing this article we have no intention to make any political statement and we do not want to trigger a sensitive discussion, we are just sharing practical viewpoints form both our personal backgrounds.