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August 23, 2016

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Deep-seated fears chip away at collective patience

NEWS about recent disenchantment with Shanghai’s new Disneyworld has set me thinking (“Fury over long Disney queues,” August 10, Shanghai Daily).

One of the main complaints amongst visitors has been the extraordinarily long waiting times at key attractions, sometime extending to three or four hours for a ten minute ride.

The raison d’etre for the magical world has always been its relentless thrills, ride after ride, character after character; but once you have to wait in the sun for even a turkey sandwich, the magic soon evaporates.

Disneyworld is not alone in falling short of our growing expectations for instant gratification. It has also been reported that movie theaters have been facing dwindling audiences.

In an age where entertainment is delivered in bite sized chunks, to be consumed on the go, or to alleviate a few moments of boredom in the routine of work or study, who has the patience to sit through two hours of melodrama, waiting for a plot to unfold?

Unless that cinematic experience were layered with additional dimensions, such as being jolted and rocked in your seat, or sprayed with water, which explains the urgency amongst filmmakers to engage more of our senses.

Marketers have coined a term for this phenomenon: they call it the “expectation economy.” And then there’s the “always-on consumer.” The more we know, the more we experience; and the more options we have to choose from, the more demanding we become. The new consumerism is fuelled by our impatience. When we order something online, we expect delivery within a few hours. If the food ordered over phone or an app is not delivered within 45 minutes, we start complaining — conveniently forgetting how much time it would take for us to prep, cook and serve a meal if we were making it ourselves.

At a popular restaurant, it is extremely disconcerting to find the next round of diners hovering behind our seats waiting for us to finish our meal. Our vacations are getting shorter — we want to pack in more destinations to share on our social media accounts. The moment we arrive at a destination we start checking in (on Facebook, not just the hotel), posting pictures rather than enjoying the place. In business, it is common to threaten suppliers and vendors with “we’ll find someone else to do the job,” when things are not delivered by unreasonable deadlines.

“Follow-up” is a standard business practice, a euphemism for pestering someone to perform a task. Today, our expectations have blended with our fears to create a cocktail of impatience that has the potential to threaten social order.

In heavily populated nations such as China and India, there is always an anxiety that someone else will experience an amusement ride before us, be served earlier, or deny us of a seat on a train, bus or flight. No small wonder then that fracases often break out in queues, instigated by someone trying to get ahead.

The impatience around e-commerce delivery is not triggered because we immediately have to use what we’ve ordered. It’s because deep inside, we’re not sure if the right item, size, portion or color will indeed be delivered. What really worries us is a lack of trust.

The speed with which rumors are spread online (something governments are very, very wary about) is the result of many people who want to be first to share; without bothering to verify content.

Our expectation that technology will make everything instantly accessible is confounded by the fact that most services are still delivered by humans. And human response rates, which involve some amount of thinking before action, are a wee bit longer.

In a study by a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in which the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users were examined, subjects were willing to be patient for just two seconds. Then they get frustrated and move on.

As author David Shenk writes in “The End of Patience,” today’s modern media technologies churn out far more words and images than we can absorb and assimilate. It is through our impatience that we now manifest our deep-rooted fears about technology overtaking and replacing us; just as our inability to keep pace creates a frustration that propels us to explore even newer technologies, albeit superficially.

 

Based in Shanghai for over a decade, Kunal Sinha is the author of two books about creativity in business: “China’s Creative Imperative,” and “Raw Pervasive Creativity in Asia,” and has taught at some of the world’s leading business schools.




 

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