After COVID-19, everything that could move online, did move online… and became cheaper, faster and higher quality in the process.
COVID-19 digitized the world at light speed. Seventy years into the information technology revolution, it became clear in early 2020 that although we thought tech was big, IT had only really scratched the surface of life. The virus ended all that.
Before the pandemic, many digital alternatives – whether to traditional healthcare, education, finance, you name it – were there; we just weren’t trying them, bemoaning “they’re too expensive” or “we’ve always done it this way.” But when the pandemic took hold, necessity dictated: “Get over it, get going, get used to it.” The COVID-19 big bang vaporized work-from-home canards about “tele-shirking” or that certain work could never be done online or virtually at all.
The lasting lesson of the bug? Everything that could move online, did move online.
The early going was a tad bumpy. After months of fumbling with Zoom Rooms and goofy online cocktail parties with fellow employees, workstreams emerged that were cheaper, faster and higher-quality. Interminable conference-call-bingo buzzwords (“Who just joined?” “Sorry … you cut out”) were replaced with flawless, frictionless UX.
Huge infrastructure investments that could scale elastically to handle millions of remote employees and/or customers reliably paid off. Legacy kludges of technical-debt-riddled patchworks of systems were deemed poison. Collaboration platforms judged to be time-sucks (no names …) were swapped for new names like Betterworks for frictionless, distraction-free remote team collaboration, Krisp (bye, background noise!), Muzzle (bye, embarrassing screen pop-ups!), and Trello (way better virtual team huddles!), in addition to the clear winners of the summer of 2020: the aforementioned Zoom and Bluescape. The use of mixed reality got a huge boost, too. With sci-fi inspirations like Star Trek’s holodeck as a lodestar, the ashes of “Second Life” were rekindled into real virtual reality (as “Sansar”). The Wild allowed workers to design virtual workspaces, and Hub Culture’s Emerald City took off.
Whether it was “be-there” livestreaming of concerts, events or remote fitness, COVID-19 accelerated remote, augmented-reality-based, “see-what-I-see,” in-the-moment troubleshooting for everything from grocery supply chains undertaking massive restocking efforts, to remote caregivers interacting with seniors or a client with a disability. Companies like Strivr, initially designed for football quarterbacks to get virtual reps, trained tens of thousands of retail workers to keep supplies running smoothly.
At schools and universities, teachers scaled experiments with online media. Rote classroom activities gave way to a fusion of lesson plans with videogame-like distance learning, all galvanized by instructors with captivating online personalities that fostered far better student engagement than physical classrooms ever did. Conferences and conventions learned similar lessons.
At hospitals, constraints of geography and brick-and-mortar physical visits diminished. The vast benefit of having “a Fitbit for your physiology” became undeniable. Diagnostics, intelligent routing to specialists and triaging – at home – became commonplace, relieving beleaguered doctors and nurses in the wake of the virus. Everything from AR-driven virtual phlebotomy from AccuVein, Shazam-like identification of heart murmurs, virtual physical therapy and digital blood-and-urine tests rivaling the ease of an at-home diabetic testing kit became ubiquitous (while phrases like “fax me the patient’s documents” became as rare as using leeches for bloodletting).
Of course, there have been downsides. Some have been seduced by virtual worlds they never want to leave. The Japanese subculture of hikikomori (“pulling inward”) became a worrying trend. Like whiskey, too much of a good thing sometimes became a bad thing, and society increasingly prioritized digital detox to give addled brains a break. Online everything rippling out of the COVID-19 big bang was just that – big. The crisis was scary, but its exigencies welded together imagination and creativity out of necessity. An electric universe of online connections pushed possibilities far beyond what had been imaginable up until the virus spread. The long-term impact of the coronavirus was the creation of a world that accepted its manifest destiny was in cyberspace – for the future of its work, play and everything in between.
