Digital vs Physical: Mutually Exclusive or Reinforcing?

Asoke K. Laha, President & MD, Interra IT

The other day I asked a bookshop owner, how his business was? I was worried that I would hurt his sentiments since the popular view is that bookstores have lost their relevance in the digital era, when book lovers are changing the medium of their reading – from print to digital. Also, people use e-commerce (Internet) to buy books of their choice. To my surprise, he was calm and stoically said that his business is doing well. Gaining some confidence upon his comfortable body language, I shot my next question: “Does Flipkart, Amazon and other e-commerce companies have any adverse impact on his revenue? “ “In no way they could cut into my business, even with deep discounts that they offer, delivery at the doorstep, sophisticated mannerisms and other goodies they offer. My business is built on trust and have a loyal list of clients, who do not go to anywhere else to buy books and that is the relationship that I have built with my clients,” he averred.

Does it mean that traditional business will continue to grow and the new forms of business transacted through digital platforms will get eclipsed in course of time? Not at all. Futurists feel that both systems of businesses would coexist, since there is scope for both and one cannot exclude the other.  There were predictions about radio being shunted out with the advent of television. The print media would eclipse with the burgeoning growth of electronic media. Many felt that people will turn more towards digital media and abandon reading books in the printed form. All these apprehensions were proved wrong by the time.

Indeed, disruptions bring changes in the habit of people or mode in which they do a work or the daily chores they carry out. For instance, habit of reading or the medium that has been used for enhancing the knowledge might have undergone a change. But nobody can take away the reading habits of the people. I enjoy reading books in the paper format.  However, often I also purchase the same book from Apple iTunes store, which I read on my iPad while travelling. For instance, a businessman would like to listen to the updates on stock market, while at home from his favourite channels or reading insights of the market behaviour from a financial daily. Early in the morning, people would like to catch up with news from the print media rather than switching on the TV sets, which may perhaps, disturb the morning quietness and serene ambience.This would mean that the situations do play an important role in selecting the medium of your choice, if you have more than one option.

I believe that there is always a hype about buying things online, which perhaps may be carefully drilled into the minds of the people, especially youngsters. If you order goods or food through the Internet and get those items at the doorstep, it is often perceived as a style statement. If fifty per cent of the population does so, by the next decade or so, all malls, department stores or even mom-and-pop shops would have to be closed down. Will it happen? I do not think so. I am a strong believer of technology and I am confident that technology can transform our lives in the planet. But I am of the opinion that there is a limit to technology like limit to growth. You may be able to create Alexas and similar robots, which will have interactive powers and can do many things that the humans can do.

What about emotional quotient of such machines?

At the end of the day, human emotional and intellectual space is much beyond what machines can ever comprehend. Human mind is not linear and cannot be extrapolated. I believe that for everyone, however big or small one may be, there is a creativity demonstrated even while doing trivial things. An artist derives creative pleasure by creating a painting or sculpture or innovating a creative form that he or she feels can call it one’s own and the intellectual insignia can be called one’s own. A housewife can draw the same creative joy by planting a tree or nurturing a plant or a vegetable in the backyard.  If you grow flowers in a pot kept inside your flat and watering and tending it every day and finally when it flowers, you can feel the creative joy. It is something different from what you can get from buying a bunch of flowers from the market. You become an end-user and a creator of that, whereas in the case of growing a plant, nurturing it, bring the plant emotionally closer to oneself. Once it flowers or bears fruits that can trigger a sense of satisfaction or joy in the person who tends it. That I call as creative joy. Will you get that satisfaction if you create top-of-the-world images of flowers in your computer even using 3D or any other superior software?  I am not hinting that such works are less creative. They are, but created in the virtual world. It does not have life, you cannot feel it. It must have originated in your brain but has not got your tender touch and care. They are inanimate, transient and lack a physical form.

I have heard about a boy in Tamil Nadu – child of ordinary folks – eking out their living by selling idlis and vadas. The boy was good at his studies and got into IIT by his own merit and later IIM. He got a good campus placement in one of the IT companies with a good pay packet. He could work their only for a few years. Stung by the feeling that he should do something for the poorer folks around his village, he left the lucrative job and started a catering service to sell idlis and vadas in the nearby places. He took orders through phones and supplied the orders at the doorstep. There was no looking back. He had collected a large number of people from his own village and nearby places and kept them as franchisees to make food and supplied far and wide through digital platforms. Now venture capitalists and investors are chasing him to invest in his company and give thumbs-up to his business model. These are entrepreneurs with a social cause and their contributions are as significant as anyone else’s.
 

Creativity can take several forms and hues. It can happen in the virtual space as also in the brick-and-mortar enterprises. But I hold the view that changes will be more pronounced in the segments where virtual and brick-and-mortar are blended judicially.  We have real-time examples Ola and Uber; Food Panda and Swiggy; OYO and e-commerce behemoth like Amazon and Walmart, which combine the simplicity and convenience of both virtual and physical medium to supply goods and services to customers at the doorstep. I feel the future is for such operations. Aided by the strengths of artificial intelligence, these operations would be the cradle of innovations, disruptions and discoveries in the future.
 

No one can predict the future with precision and with a fair degree of accuracy. With that surmise, can anyone say the future will be more dictated by digital media and less by physical world, which generally is categorized as brick and mortar? How can Internet exist if there is no physical world?  Both forms will coexist. One can only reinforce the other. That will be the order for millenniums to come.