Nowism

October 15, 2009

According to trendwatching.com the new mega trend is Nowism. The Web site claims that this mega trend has, and will continue to have, a big impact on everything from your corporate culture to customer relationships to product innovation to tactical campaigns. So what is it?

It can be phrased as consumers' ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that's building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the 'now', in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.

Also in Nowism, you speak of seconds. So even today's newspaper is too old to be useful. The power of all things 'NOW' can be traced back to the eternal lure of instant gratification and our current consumer societies handily accommodating and encouraging this relentless pursuit of instant information, communications, pleasure, if not indulgences. En passant reducing the 'now' to mere minutes, if not seconds.

Living in the seconds-world makes people disregard things very easily to never look at them again. The digital world really is the true realm of Nowism but the habits in the digital world expand to the "real" one as they cannot be separated from one another. Therefore people who get used to valuing a Web page with in a second and deciding to add it to their favorites or not ever look at it again, tend to have the same behavior in their daily lives looking at products of various brands. The brand that cannot satisfy any customer "now" cannot win the competition. Therefore it puts immense pressure on the firms to be at their very best all the time and to catch the customer while they can.

This creates a society that is flexible and adoptable.

A Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the term "Liquid Modernity." He used for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the "solid" modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives.

He says individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could be meaningfully applied.

Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable - to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

This uncertainty makes all the difference from the way the world functioned before. We might not notice it directly but the Internet changes us and the world substantially. There are sociological changes that affect our societies. Now it is all up to us to notice it and act accordingly.

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