It’s Tuesday afternoon, and I am supposed to meet with old friends in the Old Town of Stockholm. Anyone familiar with the traffic situation here knows that taking your car is not the preferable choice, but I’m facing the fact that the rest of the evening includes picking up my daughter from an evening activity and my wife from work. You know it all too well. Sometimes your options are not the best, but there is nothing you can do about it.
In my current role as a Networked Society Evangelist, I meet with people on a daily basis in the Ericsson Studio in Kista, talking about how we are driving transformation all over the world. We have been talking about the Networked Society for a little more than four years now, and even if I sometimes feel that I would love to talk about something else, I only need to look to my own day to realize that we need to keep talking about it. Because there is still so much to do.
So trying to live up to my role, I immediately search for the address on Waze, the community-driven navigation software that has changed the way we plan our trips – and that has made any built-in navigation software in cars obsolete. Always accurate and finding it’s way pass the traffic jams, it tells me I will be on time for my meeting. During my drive, it tells me if something new happens on the route and guides me onto streets I normally would not drive.
But Waze also tells me that I will make it on time only if I find a free parking spot. I spend ten minutes finding one, and the question is why parking lots are not connected and cannot tell me directly where to drive? Immediately after parking, I use my mobile phone to pay, and I know I will get a reminder when the time runs out, and I will be able to prolong the time without the need to go to my car with a new ticket.
When I drive home, I realize that a better choice for me this day could have been to book a car through car2go, a new car sharing service in Stockholm. You use your mobile phone to find, book and unlock the car and then just leave it on the street when you are at your destination. It would have saved me the hassle of paying for parking, but on the other hand, where I live I’m not allowed to leave the car2go on the street. The service is only available in selected areas of the city. So the car2go choice would have been one way only.
So even if I have been talking about the Networked Society for more than four years now, I find that even if I try to live in it as much as possible, if I am ever asked if we are living the Networked Society, I would have to answer; We’re not even halfway there.
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