Transactions do not have a time dimension. They are atomic and exist by themselves. Transactions exist in isolation.
On the other hand, relationships do have a time dimension.
For example, the ease with which we can find others online (e.g. friends from high school or college) now means that it’s easier for long-running relationships to be created. (This is extremely top-of-mind, as just this week I’ve been fortunate enough to reconnect with two old buddies, one from high school and one from college, both of whom I haven’t spent any notable amount of time with in over 20 years.)
Up until recently, I wonder if it was much more difficult to create long-running relationships. It seems to me that, historically, most "relationships" were with one’s contemporaries (literally: "with time"). We’d have connections with those who were in the same time and place that we were. It now seems easier to connect the transactions into a flow than it was even a couple of years ago.
I wonder if the business focus on the "transaction" is an artifact of the historical difficulty of representing information that has a time dimension? Or, perhaps, as we moved into the database age, the relative difficulty of representing change-over-time versus simply representing a transactional row lead to this focus on the transaction in isolation, as opposed to tracking the big picture of the evolution of a relationship over years?
It’s the difference between this and this. Which one really communicates more information?
Edited to add: I think this transactional mindset affects both customers and vendors, and is one of the things that I hope we can address with VRM.
photo: pizzodisevo
Interesting question…
In a world that has become very dependent on technology, I’ve noticed (just an opinion) that technology was so far geared toward improving the ‘transactional side of the world’ (to produce, to buy and sell, to hire/be hired..) – But that has changed, technology (social media ones) has now tackled the ‘relationship side of the world’ which has a huge ’emotional/cultural’ dimension to it. Will it be up to the challenge brought by those 2 dimensions which are, by nature, difficult to materialize in a database or will ‘online relationships’ be reduced to a set of transactions?
>will ‘online relationships’ be reduced to a set of transactions?
BINGO! that’s really the question, isn’t it?
mmm, yes it’s the question. About the answer, time will tell 😉
Time is key here (the time one can invest into something). Because as you said in your post, there’s little time one has to invest in a/a few transaction(s) but a relationship requires a lot more time to create, nurture, keep alive as fulfills a higher need in us. It goes deeper in us.
As a parrallel, I listened to an NPR show today where the theme was: “is google making us stupid”. Recent studies start to suggest that students aren’t able to go as deep as before, they can’t read a book anymore. They’ve been trained to click and scan, spending a little time on a lot of things rather than a lot of time on few things.
If this is a change that takes place beyond the field of study, then may be relationships will be a set of transaction.
Time will tell 😉
I think it’s just an expected step in development of our civilisations, however I disagree with statement that the long-term relationships are build easier nowadays. In Victorain England women and men (truth rather separately) would build very strong friendships – it’s the space that changes (distance means totally different thing today than it did 50 years ago!)- and time remains the same – it takes the same amount of time for human being to call another ‘real friend’ doesn’t?