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Yosemite Sam often warned, “Varmint, I’m a-gonna blow you to smithereens!” But while the deadly viral pandemic is far more serious than a cartoon, the social and economic impact of COVID-19 has indeed reduced many norms to mere fragments: smithereens!
Education has used distance learning since around 1870, with correspondence courses. Then, as some will recall, courses began on public TV around the country. With the advent of the internet and cheaper personal computers, online courses rapidly made up roughly 25% of college instruction. Today some accredited virtual universities promote course instruction entirely online, allowing students to achieve associate degrees in less than two years. And traditional four-year universities have dramatically increased online courses during the pandemic, some to a virtual 100%.
So you see, as Scott Galloway notes in his new book “Post Corona,” which we referenced in this space last month, the pandemic has not created these types of changes but has accelerated trends already afoot, taking virtual platforms and fragmenting them by providing at-home services to the many who were once the few. That’s a term to remember: at-home services.
Those whose jobs are not tied to a factory floor, retail counter, warehouse or fulfillment center, or hospital room, to name a few, have lived the biggest shift, working from home. Galloway calls it “the great dispersion.”
While in-person office interactions can foster creativity, virtual reciprocity marches on. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, noted in a recent New York Times piece that advances in technology enable “increasingly accurate lifelike representations of some kind of reality through analog or digital mimicry, what you could call virtualization.”
The dispersion of which Galloway speaks is really the difference between the physical and the virtual. We used to buy books in a bookstore. Now a great many buy them on Amazon. We used to try on reading glasses at the optometrist. Now we do it virtually through Warby Parker. I used to go to Moses Melody Shop to listen to and, Mr. Moses hoped, buy a record. Now the tune is streamed on my phone via iTunes — no vinyl, no needle, turntable, no album cover. Who do you know who’s bought a car online and had it delivered? Carvana has sold more than 200,000 cars online this year.
Buying from home is one thing. Working from home is quite another. The work-from-home experience tends to increase productivity, with workers sitting down at the computer at any time of day, instead of intermittently from 8 a.m-5 p.m., allowing family and home commitments to be intertwined with job responsibilities.
However, there are distractions for those with school-aged children participating in online learning. But as schools reopen to normal hours, work-from-home will most likely continue, with upwards of 45% of businesses reporting to the Wall Street Journal in July that they plan to allow full-time employees to stay put on the street where they live. No lost time commuting or “getting ready for work.” Just productively engaging the workday in sweatpants or no pants on Zoom!
As Yogi Bera said, “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” But there will be general, long-lasting results coming from our hoped-for pandemic past. These will include the increase in work-from-home employment. In addition, extending from the new definition of homework will be a focus on the quality of the at-home environment, including a renewed interest in American or locally made products, on out-of-home leisure and the products and services supporting outdoor recreation, and on keeping technology at our fingertips and making sure the latest products and platforms are at hand. There also will be increased attention to health and wellness, both personally and through collaborative telemedicine.
Vaccinations have begun with more on the way. Late spring and summer are looking promising as a post-pandemic new day dawns. And, hopefully, if we all do our part, this latest varmint will be blown to smithereens!
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