Guest Post: Sharat Sannabhadti

Sharat is one of Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking students. This is his second guest post on the blog. Here he writes about virtual communication.

If you are an international student like me I am dead sure you will have ‘Skype’ on your laptop. If not Skype there will be some software similar to ‘Skype’ that lets you chat with your family back home free of cost! Isn’t that great? I can talk to my family whenever I want, and with video chat it is just like talking to them face-to-face. The technological developments in communication have so drastically changed our lives! Thanks to virtual communication, we are connected to each other 24/7.

Today we use some or the other form of virtual communication almost daily in our lives. There is email, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, chat applications, social networking sites, blogs and what not. Why is everyone communicating virtually today? (Sometimes I have even chatted with my teammate sitting right next to me instead of talking to him face-to-face!) Here are some major advantages of virtual communication that I can come up with:

1. Lets people situated at different corners of the world communicate
2. Saves travel cost
3. Saves time

In fact during the recent global economic downturn many organizations cut down on their travel costs by conducting virtual meetings. The movie ‘Up in the Air’ takes it one step further. In the movie, they use video conference calls to fire people. Videoconferencing primarily helps to save on travel costs and time. But one other major factor is that through video conference calls they can avoid the awkwardness of letting someone know that they are being fired to their face. It is strange because even in the case of videoconferencing it is just like talking face-to-face. The key point here is that it is almost ‘like’ face-to-face conversation. There are some key differences. The main advantage in this case is that the communication can end whenever the person giving the bad news wants it to end. Virtual communication does not score high when it comes to sharing human emotions as compared to face-to-face communication (although video communication has reduced the gap by a great amount). Many projects involving virtual teams fail just because of the lacking ‘human touch’ in such type of communication. It is difficult to develop a high level of understanding, co-operation and comfort with someone whom you have known only through e-mail conversations.

There are advantages and also disadvantages to virtual communication. But the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Virtual communication is only going to develop further. Social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have brought in a whole new dimension to our lives. There will definitely be newer inventions coming up in this space and it will be interesting to see how they change our lives!