Devangshu Datta: The socio-digital divide

VIEWPOINT

In "Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Taken for the Eye to Evolve" (Royal Society, 1994), Daniel Nilsson and Suzanne Pelger developed a model of genetic mutations, which suggested that a light-sensitive cell could evolve into an eye within 100,000 generations at the most. This "pessimistic assessment" allows for dead-end mutations and missteps in the process.

Social evolution takes considerably less time. In 15 years, the cellphone has revolutionised the way in which people network. It is normal now to arrange a meeting thus: "Call when you're at Khan Market and we'll decide where to meet." Or to say, "Get to Savitri, then ask for directions to my office". Or "I'm standing under a Nokia billboard near the IIT Crossing. Please tell me where to go."

Cab-drivers, plumbers, electricians and kirana-shops are also cell-phone-driven nowadays. If you hire a car for the day, you no longer note where the chauffeur parks at an interim stop; just call when you want to be picked up again. If you need to fix a time for the plumber's visit, call on his cell and he calls back when he's free.

In contemporary corporate circles, it is perfectly acceptable to text somebody your contact details on a digital business card. It takes three seconds to send or to save a B-CARD and everybody's comfortable with it.

Yet shibboleths of the past remain. Networking is somehow "not proper" networking if it's purely digital. If you're going to be taken seriously in business circles, you'd better have a printed card as well. There is something to the ritual of exchanging handshakes ("firm, dry, with eye-to-eye contact", recommends Business Etiquette for Dummies), followed by business cards, which has been hardwired into our socio-business DNA.

Another relic from the past is the wristwatch. Given that most people carry cellphones, which display the correct time by default, a watch is just jewellery. You can flaunt it, it's a perfectly acceptable wedding gift; but it duplicates functionality. Yet most executives would consider themselves under-dressed if they pushed off to office without a wristwatch.

The little black book (or rolodex, or the telephone directory, for that matter) has, however, fallen out of favour. Everybody uses phones or PDAs as digital diaries to store numbers. If you need to look up an unknown number, you go online and search. Or you check caller-ID.

What's the difference between a watch and a telephone directory? Telephone directories have never been considered mainstream fashion-accessories, although they are used and abused sometimes by strongmen flaunting their muscles.

A watch is only marginally more useful than the human appendix. Somewhere along the path of physical evolution, the digestive system lost the need for an appendix. But the appendix remains""although it lacks all functionality. The watch is only useful in exceptional circumstances when the cell doesn't work.

Seen in those terms, the watch business and the business card printing business should have gone into dramatic decline with the advent of digital connectivity. After all, internal combustion engines were directly responsible for the demise of the equine industry and this seems like a near-exact parallel.

Yet this hasn't happened. The B-card printers are doing as well as ever. The watch-makers of the world have seen a jump in margins per sale that has more than compensated for dips in volumes.

This is because watches are fashion accessories and have always been. So is a business card. These widgets allow strangers to make judgment calls about each other's social status, taste and style. Just like a tie, or a penchant for single malts, or a single-digit gold handicap, it signals important information about the person, without screaming it from the rooftops.

Obviously, watches and business cards retain economic utility in a way that horses didn't. That utility is difficult to quantify or define. But it's there. I wonder which other industries will make the transition from functionality to fashion in the next few decades.