Guest Post: Sunny Huang

Sunny is a student in Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking class. Here she writes about virtual communication.

A couple of months ago, before I came to the U.S. to start my master’s program, I paid a visit to the 2010 World Expo which is being held in Shanghai, China. Admittedly, the grand Expo gathering of more than 190 countries along with many organizations, enterprises brings great opportunities for communication in economy, commerce and culture. But in spite of the excitements of “around the world in one day”, I still reserve doubts as to whether such an Expo still holds the same importance in communications as its early emergence in the 19th century. In an era dominated by instant information exchanges via all kinds of high technologies, people rely more and more on virtual communication than the real-world counterparts. Undoubtedly, there are necessities and amazing advantages to virtual communication. On the other hand, there are also potential barriers in virtual communication that are worth our close inspection.

The burgeoning telecommunications technologies in the past decades have made virtual communication possible, and step-by-step made it indispensable to our daily lives. As we’ve been so used to the high efficiency in transferring information between thousands of miles within seconds, it’s impossible to turn back to the snail ways of sending mails or telegraphs. Embracing virtual communication is not only because of the tremendous convenience brought by high technologies, but more importantly because of the critical role of high efficiency in today’s dynamic environment. It’s the real-time virtual communication via modern technologies that has “flattened” the whole world, so that more regions and enterprises can step onto the broader stage for stronger influences and larger profits. For example, by utilizing the advantages of virtual communication in cutting down cost in money and time, industries like IT gain even greater success, e.g. in products development collaborated by geographically distributed teams, or call centers that provide customer support 24/7.

Nevertheless, people keep coping with the new problems which have emerged from virtual communication along with its advantages. While e-mail and teleconferences have replaced face-to-face interactions, obstacles for better understanding still exist. Here I’d like to take my personal experiences as an example. I once worked in several software development projects that involved globally distributed design centers. Naturally, most of the communication consisted of e-mails, phone calls and teleconferences. Although the core concept in collaborative development is to optimize the resource allocations and utilizations, sometimes the negative experiences like endless e-mail discussions, and inefficient teleconferences made people suspect whether the way of working was improved or deteriorated by virtual communication. I believe for virtual communication in the international companies, although the spatial distances have been shortened, there are still mental distances because of culture differences, conflicts and/or concerns from different standpoints of different organizations. The communication styles differ between west and east originally, and while communicating in the virtual ways, the culture differences seem to be exaggerated. For example in writing e-mails, the western, professional way is to state the point clearly in the beginning, while the Chinese is to start with more greetings or background introduction, intending to avoid any feelings of aggressiveness. Besides such cultural differences, the collaborative teams came from organizations with different standpoints after all. There were conflicts and problems similar to those existing in the real-world communication. In such a sense, we should still stick to the fundamental rules in efficient communication, and at the same time adapt to specific situations in the virtual world, so that the advantages of virtual communication can be utilized to their greatest extent.