Alice in #DigitalWonderland
When the future of your past becomes your present.
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she arrived in a strange and fantastic world of odd characters and unfamiliar creatures, including a mad hatter and a jabberwocky.
That is exactly how I felt on re-entering the professional working space - at the age of 49 - as the newest employee at a Performance Digital Marketing Agency; perhaps minus the mad hatter and the jabberwocky!
Like Alice, I had fallen down a hole and entered a peculiar and perplexing parallel universe. It even came with its own foreign language!
(This was so far removed from my previous life as a primary school English teacher).
When I had entered the workforce in the 90s, ‘digital’ was the opposite of ‘analogue;’ referring to time; ‘domain’ was the pronunciation for a field, in French, and ‘social’ and ‘media’ had no obvious connection.
At that time, if you had interviewed my younger self, I would have thought this alien world of digital marketing and technology a good idea for a science fiction movie script. And yet there was nothing virtual or extra-terrestrial about my current reality. It had suddenly become my ‘everyday’ and it was not a dream. In fact, it felt as if I had awoken from a dream.
The different characters I met - although strange in a millennial kind of way - were kind and helpful, pointing this way and that as they dashed about with dizzying speed. I watched in awe as they multitasked and looked through their personal ‘looking glasses,’ speaking sentences and phrases overloaded with incomprehensible acronyms.
In turn, I am sure I was just as much a strange anomaly to my young colleagues as they were to me. They seemed truly amazed at my brainstorming, time management, strategising and organisational skills that were my default as a teacher and were in awe that I still used pen and paper to collect my thoughts. (Perhaps, after all, they could learn something from a relic). 😉
‘I think I should understand that better, if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it,’ said Alice.
Alice had my back. My vocabulary quickly exploded to include acronyms such as SEO, CTA, ROIs, CPCs. UX, OKRs and KPIs as well as terminology that focused on Google insights and a marketing funnel. A slow start, I admit, but learning another language and understanding the jargon takes time.
Every now and then, the characters stopped their hurrying and scurrying about to come alongside me and explain and listen. They answered my questions, patiently showing me the same thing over and over again, until I understood. They acknowledged me in this tech-dominated world, no matter how strange I was to them. At least no-one said, ‘Off with her head!’
‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?'
That was the key.
Even in a fast-paced landscape of laptops and digitised technology - which is the backbone to a Digital Marketing Agency’s business strategy and service - the players had not lost the heart behind the technology; communication, conversations and connecting - face to face - not just through the ‘looking glass.’ And last I looked, the relational interactions, laughs, intuition and caring have not yet completely been replaced by AI. (Who knows what the future holds?). But no matter where this digital world takes us and how it evolves, at some level, we all know it cannot survive without a little bit of heart. 💜
In this exciting and strangely scary wonderland, I have realised, like Alice, that ‘I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.’
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