Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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Connecting With Phones Rather Than Cameras

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If you have work to discuss with others, think twice before turning a meeting into a bad video.

All of us are discovering the mixed experience of connecting with others via one or another video application. The default has usually been a connection through Zoom, FaceTime or Skype.  But if you really want to discuss ideas rather than “chat,” you may have a better discussion without staring at a screen that looks like a time-warp version of your high school yearbook.

A screen filled with faces is not only a distraction, there is a solid theoretical reason why video undermines discussion. As early as the 1950s the great thinker Susanne Langer explained that “presentational media”–meaning media forms that emphasize images– easily dominate over “discursive” forms that communicate by what has been said.  Ideas require more cognitive effort than simple images.

The problem is that our era preferences images.  Zoom is a prime example.  It’s fine for visiting too rarely seen grandkids or family.  But it’s far less satisfactory explaining complex thoughts, policies or values.  You’ve maybe had better luck, but my Zoom audio levels are terrible and obviously operating with very little bandwidth.  By contrast, the conference call system I’ve been using for classes puts a person’s voice at close range, not four feet away as picked up by an afterthought microphone.  It’s just easier to hear people when their ideas and inflections are more clearly rendered.  It would not add much to see my students in their virtual phone booths. (I cheat a little: they also have pre-loaded PowerPoints to follow at the same time.)

As to the Supreme Court: most of the attention in these sessions is where it should be: on the quality of arguments and evidence.

It’s no surprise a preference for audio only is what the Supreme Court has recently chosen. They are communicating via a simple conference call system. Granted, the lawyers answering questions would surely like to read the body language of the Justices. But most of the attention in these sessions is where it should be: on the quality of arguments and evidence.

I’m not alone in thinking that we have oversold turning teaching into television show of reaction shots. Writing recently in the New York Times (May 4), Kate Murphy writes that others have noted how the steam has gone out of their meetings or teaching: undermined by out of sync sound, bad pictures, and the inevitable challenges of forcing all participants to go into an awkward self-presentation mode . Never mind the interruptions from unwanted intruders.

Not surprisingly, audio-only phone use is way up.  It’s also finally being recognized as an often overlooked form of telehealth, especially in the mental health field.  A lot of Americans are sensing that there is less need to see the people they want to talk to.

To be sure, communicating by phone or video is far from perfect. As most of us are discovering everyday, we are hard-wired to connect in real time and real space. And while there are times when it is great to see others, if you have substantive work with others to complete during this period of self-isolation, think twice before turning a meeting into a bad video.

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Islands of Isolation

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The present moment has created more self-isolation than most would like.  We know what it means to be alone with one’s own thoughts. Chatter with others may be in short supply. But our consciousness can easily take the chatter inside.  We may share a common culture and lineage, and we can build bridges to each other, but can our reservoirs of self-reflection ever be made transparent? 

Climate scientists warn that it will be just decades until areas of South Florida will become a watery archipelago. The level of the sea rises about one inch a year in Miami Beach, inundating streets that some residents continue to believe are flooded by water main breaks.  Even in denial, those residents must sense that a chain of islands makes continuous connection with the rest of the community an insurmountable problem.

Interestingly, communication scholar John Durham Peters makes the same observation about human communication (Speaking Into the Air, 1999).  We are, he says, our own islands of consciousness, forever separated from others.  We may share the same culture, but we can never fully know another person’s world.

All of this is Peters’ way of reminding us that we have oversold our abilities to make things right through communication.  He notes that problems of connecting with others are “fundamentally intractable.”  Our attempts at doing so creates a “registry of modern longings” that can never be satisfied.  Disappointment is a natural part of the effort.  As Peters notes:

Our sensations and feelings are, physiologically speaking, uniquely our own.  My nerve endings terminate in my own brain, not yours.  No central exchange exists where I can patch my sensory inputs into yours, nor is there any “wireless” contact through which to transmit my experience of the world to you. . . .  In this view, humans are hardwired by the privacy of experience to have communication problems.

                    Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, Wikipedia.org

Of course the theme of humans physically together and psychologically apart is universal, reflected in everything from Edward Hopper’s lone figures in the painting, Nighthawks (1942),  to virtually any film or play that treats individuals and relationships in all of their complexities.  The tensions inherent in coupling and adapting are shot through most country ditties about loneliness as frequently as recurring film narratives of abandonment.

This perspective only seems pessimistic if we believe in a kind of communication that is so stipulative or stripped of complexity as to be uninteresting. I can say with great accuracy that the Ketchup in our household is in the refrigerator, and know I can be understood.  But who cares?  The things that usually matter–feelings, values, aspirations and needs–all hide more easily out of sight. Could it be otherwise when we engage with other living souls with different life histories, memories, fantasies and fears?

Another part of our common over-optimism about communication is that advances in technologies are themselves reasons to mitigate communication confusion. Our devices make it possible to talk or text through every waking hour.  But, if anything, opportunities for sending and receiving messages only increase the chances to see the differences between us that remain.

The trick here is to accept the challenges that human complexity creates, without descending into the view that the outside world is mostly a mental mirage. To fall into that trap is to deny the chances that are still possible when words, images and music make sometimes durable bridges to others.