HELLO, OUT THERE!

When my associate deputy editor, Anton Javier, told me about the subject of the cover profile he was writing — Ms Rachel Pang, founder of livestream commerce platform Shopavision — I had to go online and see what the excitement about her rise to fame was about. I quickly realized that she wasn’t just about selling things. Although the avowed purpose of her website was to connect businesses with consumers, it was also about building interdependent microcommunities that could communicate with one another. She was primarily building tribes and connecting them, the way I view it. And isn’t that the cardinal rule of customer engagement? Build and connect first before you sell.

Like many I people I know, I was on social media sites frequently during the early days of the lockdown. I knew I wasn’t alone and that my motives were the same as those of others: To connect with people. I felt isolated in a situation that I had wished for many times when the goings were tough — a month of Sundays (but that was when things were normal). On weekdays when no children were breaking their bones and screaming in the playground, solitary activities such as reading a good book was suddenly discomfiting and strangely quiet.

On Facebook, I found many people asking friends to post images, personal anecdotes, or words of encouragement as a round game. While we might have been keeping one eye on the grim COVID-19 figures, we were surreptitiously distracting ourselves recalling and sharing movies we liked, places we visited, and meals we cooked and ate. The underlying motive was clearly to find a tribe, or many tribes, and to stay to them for a while until the enthusiasm waned and another more interesting tribe came into the picture.

These transitory associations were eventually elevated and physicalized when some of the restrictions on going out were eased.

People began setting up schedules to complete their office chores and to make time for Zoom meetings. The novelty of the experience, of seeing what other people’s homes were like or how they looked like without makeup, outweighed, I suspect, the real objectives for attending such meetings. I personally just wanted to tell someone that I had a meeting, and pretend that I was exhausted because I was working. That feigned annoyance was there to signify that things were returning to normal; that the things I used to do had recovered some of its regularity, even urgency.

Pretty soon, people began sending things to one another — homecooked food, face masks, books, little handmade presents. It was no longer virtual — you could finally taste your friend’s so-so banana bread, and even praise him for it.

The lockdown has taught us to make do with what was within reach, to appreciate the familiar and sometimes the commonplace. With little distractions to use as a ruse for not paying attention, we had no recourse but to look at what we had, and what we were capable of doing.

Many things are starting to look familiar again; the rhythm of life is slowly returning. I have disengaged from some of those tribes that I joined four, five months ago. The tag games asking participants to post where they want to spend their vacations have stopped, too.

Hello, out there! I’m on my way.