The Internet has made location redundant. Has it really?

In 1997, the Book “Death of Distance” by Frances Cairncross popularized the concept that The Web made distance redundant. Twenty years is a long time for the internet to have established its dominance and made all of us servile to the web.

While there is no doubt that our lives have come to be dominated by it’s almost omnipresence, but if you peep into any shopping area or a bank or eatery, there seems to be overwhelmed by a rush of people to buy their products or services.

Business.com in a 2017 report claims that for e-commerce sales as percentage of total retail sales, China has the highest share at 15.9% followed by United States of America at 7.5%.

We also have witnessed a surge in retail real estate prices in most growing economies in the world.

So why is it that in spite of our growing addiction and dependence on the ubiquitous mobile phone and a plethora of other such gadgets, commerce is still dependent on the traditional methods of exchange and interaction?

The possible reasons for this could be many:

In a recently published essay “How Geography Shapes—and is Shaped By—the Internet,” written by Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb, and Shane Greenstein, the authors attempt to answer the question, “What consequences did the spread of the internet have for geographical location of economic activity?”

In an interview with Sean Silverthorne of Harvard Business School, Shane Greenstein states that “though internet technology ostensibly diffused everywhere, it did not get experienced as the same technology in each location”.

Moving away from the business side, many of us would rather hear a living human voice no matter how human & intelligent ‘Alex’ may sound. The Voice Assistant Market is right now on fire but could be a novelty factor or a fad driving it. Human beings need appropriate responses from other human beings to perpetuate their own self-worth. Machines are years away, if at, in providing us that same sense of wellbeing.