Through Deirdre Straughan I became aware of a 2008 blog post by Derek Powazek called Meaning-Making Machines.
It’s about how when we interact with people using computers there are gaps in our knowledge of the situation caused by a lack of social cues that are present in face-to-face human interactions. We fill in these gaps with images of our own making. Powazek claims these images are a product of our own insecurities, and they may sometimes be, but I’m not sure he makes the case that they are necessarily so constructed.
Every fortnight I take part in a telephone conference. This week I went to the meeting in person for the first time. The gaps I had filled in were not particularly different from the reality – they were just unspecific. Of course, the phone at least gives you voice rather than just words on a screen, so I did already have some social cues. But it was fascinating to me how much more I cared about the meeting having met the people involved in person. And I will care about the conference calls more too from now on, because my non-specific imaginings were a lot less engaging than the reality of the individuals I met.
Obviously video can’t provide all the social cues that text-only communications lack. People act differently in front of a camera than in face-to-face communication, and there is still a sense of distance. But some kind of video interaction, even minimal, with people you interact with online would seem to me to fill in at least some of the gaps.
