Digital Weird

There is much opportunity to show up these days. Social networking platforms are like stages for shining and showing off your personal and professional experiences, quirks and skills. We can connect, debate and create, at scale. It’s true. Technological advancement brings access like never before. We can use new tech to get heard, to find opportunities, to get things done. Magnifying individual good is one of the wonderful opportunities of this digital day and age, says futurist Graeme Codrington.

Unsurprisingly, this level of access also applies to personal information about ‘us’. According to digital thought leader Mike Saunders, two years ago the World Economic Forum (WEF) had already named data the new currency. If you are not paying for a product, such as an online social networking platform (most of us are on one at least), then you should understand that you are the product.

So whilst we throw up concerns around privacy, and indeed we are right to question, perhaps we should focus our questions beyond whether we have privacy or not, to whether we are happy with the trades we are making in exchange for our personal information. Good questions to ask are, what information does this platform hold about me, and what are they doing with it? What value does it add for me?

Take Alexa. Alexa is a cloud-based virtual personal assistant that is continually updating its intelligence, something like Apple’s Siri. You ask or command and Alexa responds. You may be searching for information, such as news, weather, traffic or for a new recipe, or asking Alexa to play your ‘tunes’ or the radio. But you can also use Alexa to get things done. You can ask it to create to-do lists, shop, order an Uber and control smart home products (think temperature, alarms). “Keep up with your busy lifestyle and maximise the potential of the smart devices that you own with increased convenience” says this website, with its blog helping you to compare Google Home and Amazon Echo, so that you can make an informed decision on design, features and capabilities. Alexa is a paid service, and it is learning all the time, based on what you feed it, and you benefit. There is your trade.

On LinkedIn, the free version, you get to profile yourself professionally and to tap into the opportunities presented through a global living network. You are the product – just like you are on Facebook and Instagram, if you are not paying for the service. As inspirational speaker and strategy facilitator Siphiwe Moyo reminds us, it is not just millennials, everyone has options and choice and we should be exercising that choice. Exercising choice means becoming aware of what your options are, and understanding them well, so that you can make informed choices or trades, and really take advantage of what a digital age offers.

Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review contributor shows us how we can do this in her work Standout. She grew up in a very small town in North Carolina – pre-Internet era – and felt incredibly frustrated with the lack of opportunities. She argues that too many of us still believe that heads down and hard work hard equals recognition and career success. Clark teaches us how to develop big ideas, leverage affiliations and build a community of followers. The process of finding great ideas and getting them heard makes it possible for us to change the world for the better (previously quite difficult, when we were non-digital). But is also the best form of career insurance. You capitalize on your unique perspective and knowledge and inspire others to listen and take action. Recognize your own value, cultivate your expertise, and put yourself out there, she says. It is no surprise that her examples Seth Godin, who in his book, “We are all weird” notes:

“The choice to push all of us toward a universal normal merely to help sell more junk to the masses is both ineffectual and wrong. The opportunity of our time is to support the weird, to sell to the weird, and, if you wish, to become the weird.”

In the workplace of tomorrow, robots will perform repetitive, monotonous tasks. They can do them better and faster than we can. That means our human energy is freed up to focus on what we are evolved to do. New tech can actually unlock human potential. Is it unlocking yours? And where are you showcasing that?

#FindYourDigitalWeird