Has the virtual office come of age?
The office as we know it is under threat, but its virtual cousin is just getting going.
What do you think of when you hear the word workplace? It probably suggests a physical location that you can feel and photograph, a built thing with weight, colour and texture. But the biggest and most important part of our workplace is invisible, intangible and huge, and it grew without any effort from us – we put in less effort than we use to turn on a bath tap.
Our regular working environment has been an office, or more recently, a corner of our home, or sometimes a table in a café or a train. These places were curated to keep out the weather and provide a modicum of comfort. We just needed to add our own personal magic and a couple of plug-in tools and the result was output, productivity, information, creation.
But this is a skewed view of the modern world. The workplace is now principally a virtual infrastructure, like a subterranean mycelium designed and owned by others, not us, not even our employers.
We work every day in a deeply sophisticated digital environment powered by electrons marshalled in conductors and switches in phones, screens, computers, amplifiers, transmitters and receivers. They do our bidding to record events, build imaginary scenes, tell stories, generate drawings, display moving images, store information, transmit sound and relay messages. The internet retrieves data instantly by a process as mysterious as tossing a message in a bottle into the Thames and having someone retrieve it one second later and read it in Sydney.
The workplace is now principally a virtual infrastructure, like a subterranean mycelium designed and owned by others, not us, not even our employers.
We think nothing of speaking to several people at once, with live video, located in different countries on our mobile phones. We entrust our vital data to be stored in a ‘cloud’ which we can’t see – and never will. We risk transmitting sensitive financial information and transactions via unseen channels. Artificial intelligence, or machine learning, tells us what we want before we know we want it, beats you at chess, and translates a conversation into several languages.
Electronic energy is sculpted into music, films, voices and text and transferred by radio signals to and from our devices. Wi-Fi at home and in your coffee shop is just the beginning; there are entire cities with free wireless networks, and there are plans to cover the rest of the planet with drones, high altitude balloons and orbiting satellites.
So, this is now the workplace. Our offices and handy bits of furniture can seem important with their traditional status, but we can mix and match desks, and put up with old office buildings. They can even add some quaint charm if handled well.
But when our broadband fails, we lose a mobile signal, our laptop refuses to boot, or our phone runs out of battery, grumpiness is not the outcome, it is more likely rage, panic, fear and depression.
The physical workplace is important – it is also my living – but it plays second fiddle to the invisible workplace in the sky or, more accurately, the cloud, and for better or worse we should pay more attention to it.
