Nikhaar is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.
Daiki To, a Japanese businessman, tries to hurry through the last meeting of the day in Los Angeles at 5 in the afternoon. Noticing his anxiety, a co-worker inquires to which Daiki exclaims “It’s almost 9 AM in Tokyo! My daughter will be waking up anytime, it’s her birthday!” After he completes the meeting on time, he grabs his coat and races to his hotel. As soon as he makes it to his suite, he opens his notebook and gleams with happiness as he virtually watches his daughter smile while she cut the birthday cake in front of him.
This is not a lone occurrence; 32 million [1] such stories happen each and every day to form a total of 300 billion [2] annual minutes from the free video call provider Skype. In comparison, for the same year, the total telecom minutes for the 2011 in USA were 2250 billion [3]. With everybody from governments, corporations, institutions, universities and personal users shifting to virtual communication to save cost, resources and time, the question perturbing everybody is – Is virtual communication an effective and sustainable replacement for physical communication?
As software engineers from India video-chat with their European counterparts to discuss daily progress in projects, governments set up video meeting times to address issues of their subjects and legal decisions based on video conferences with a witness from a secret location – there is no denying that virtual communication is facilitating immense savings in time, resources and cost. It is only due to virtual communication that these software engineers don’t need to travel to Europe every month, these governments don’t have to establish infrastructure in rural areas and these witnesses can be assured of better protection.
But a study from Cornell [4] shows that virtual communication is not as effective as faceto- face methods. The survey also states that a majority of executives prefer face-to-face communication to its technical counterpart, citing reasons like differentiation in bonding, multitasking, quality relationships and body language analysis. Another study [5] in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication discovers that virtual communication leads to a lot of trust issues between teams, and the trust developed is fragile and temporal.
So, to summarize – given the present state of the economy, virtual communication will increasingly keep on replacing physical communication but physical communication should be given preference during meetings where trust and bonding is of pivotal importance.
[2] http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/-metro-drives-magic-across-all-ourexperiences--
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[3] http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/research/index.cfm/aid/10323
[4] http://cornellsun.com/node/44228
[5] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00080.x/full
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