Online meetings are great.
There are some moments though when reading body language, micro-expressions and facial expressions, would also be really useful. And you can't properly do any of that online.
First of all, no-one seems to know when to start speaking, leaving you with
awkward pause A. Or of course, speakverpetwoopleing the top of each other B, which then creates awkward pause A anyway, and a loop of A and B into which we might well fall forever, or until Meeting Organiser regains control and starts talking.
Then there's the question of who shares their camera and who doesn't. We were here yesterday of course when I accidentally showed off my dressing gown to my new boss. But it seems there's still a bit of an unspoken confusion about whether you should be visible or not. And some of these platforms let you blur your background, or even display somewhere else like San Francisco or the Moon! Sensible? Or showy? Or paranoid?
At the moment, the camera-resolution isn't quite detailed enough anyway. It can't give us the micro-expressions we never knew we relied so much upon in real meetings. And even if it could, there's no way to see the whole room at once, to study reactions to what's being presented. I never knew how useful a thing that was to do!
Presenter makes joke. Boss shakes head slowly from side-to-side. Colleague stifles a laugh on the other side of the table. There's no narrative like that in TeamSkypeZoomLand.
And of course, if you're not speaking, you should always mute your microphone - otherwise the chat is awash with interference - in most platforms, coughing or sneezing unmuted will actually put you on-screen in front of everyone else, as the software tries to prioritise who's speaking. And that's not ideal if you're still in your dressing gown. Or if you've got post-sneeze-face in 'San Francisco'. Or if you're trying to avoid those awkward pause loops.
So, we're still learning the culture and etiquette of this newish way of communicating. It's socially fascinating, even if the situation that's created the need for it is dreadful and surreal.
I don't mean that in a flippant sense. It really is surreal - "over the top of reality", as though someone somewhere is dreaming, and we're all characters in the story their sleeping brain has concocted.
In what universe two weeks ago, would our country be pledging 15% of our GDP to help keep people alive and our businesses running? In which parallel dimension would we needed to have tumbled, to have got here so fast! A world where we can no longer be hugged or held by people, where we can't hold hands to gently show each other it'll all be alright, nor eat together, nor do all the simple things we used to take for granted, like going to the movies, out for a coffee, a drink in a pub, watching our sports team. It was unthinkable a month ago; now here we are - deep in the wormhole.
Anyway, I don't want the isolation to get to me. That's not going to help anyone. Surreal it might all be, but it's also real - nobody's dreaming this.
But it might also be a world full of opportunity, actually: opportunity for families to spend time together while they self-isolate; opportunity for us to remember our neighbours while we do our best to work from home together; opportunity to remind each other of what really matters, and how preciously we hold our friends and our family, even though we can't hold them at all.
And I'm resolved to still be the best I can be, even if for a while, I'm just a voice and a message and a face on a screen.
Well. You know. That's if I actually remember to unmute myself and turn my camera on.
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