Five Physical World beliefs that fail in the Digital World

Transitioning effectiveness from physical to digital world often requires revisiting cherished beliefs and accepting the limitations of these beliefs as action gets transported to digital world.  Unless consciously called to note, these beliefs stay hidden and affect the overall results.  Top five such beliefs are:

1. Keep only the most useful- throw the waste:  Anything that has not been used for last three months has very limited probability of being used ever again.  Dispose that and free up some space- so goes the logic in the physical world.  This is clearly not true in digital world.  Check files in your desktops that have not been used for over six months, and note that you are actually keeping multiple versions of these documents with no intent to delete.  In physical world, carrying things costs and hence exclude/expunge those that you don’t need while in digital world loosing things that you may require (in case) is more painful than carrying additional inventory.  As David Weinberger says- In digital world, it costs more to exclude then include, and inclusion is lot easier. 
2. Social loafing is not acceptable and is to be exposed:  We all resist social loafing in group work and expect social loafer to buy permission by compensating elsewhere (either in financial or social form) or risk being socially exposed.  In social media, social loafers- those set of passive consumers who only read and download your stuff and occasionally vote in form of likes, are actually welcome.  Going by statistics, free riders are lot more than content creators and contributors.  They tend to provide psychological returns for the investments creators make in developing the content.
3. Always go with the Professional advice:  Peers comments are more reliable than that of critics in deciding the best restaurant to dine at. Experience sharing at sites like patientslikeme.com, provide good reference to compare your doctor advice with.  People like me will have unstated evaluation criteria similar to mine, and will have seldom hidden motive to misguide.  Off-course, if the stakes are high, and involve specialized and contextual knowledge, professional advice prevails.  According to Clay Shirky, go for professional advice if you are taking about brain surgery, but its ok to go with peers advice while choosing restaurant.  
4. Revisions represent errors that can not be ignored:  Think deep and wide, develop opinion, publish and persist- for the reputational and financial cost of undoing or reworking is very high in the physical world.  Not so, in the digital world, where you start small, build on, refine, refute, synthesize and redefine almost continually as more information and views pour in.  Iterations represent dynamism, responsiveness and agility in the digital world! 
5. Real work requires serious money to get it done: It costs to commit dedicated resources spending physical efforts and time to execute work and needs to be paid for.  Digital world leverages collective knowledge of commons (aggregated through google) and free time of the volunteers (emotionally hooked to the cause) to create works of great social and civic importance.  Wikipedia represents one hundred million hours of volunteer cumulative work – as per Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher. 

It is the wider appreciation of the different set of beliefs ruling the two worlds that needs to be stressed upon, as we design strategies to use digital world in non-linear radical manner.

      Reflect!