In-Person Starvation
7 minute read
“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. ”
To state the obvious, we miss each other. We connect virtually, in a two-dimensional, scheduled world. The image of us appears, in real time, but it is not true presence, and the fatigue of distance takes its toll. The innate social needs of people suggests that there may be a hierarchy of connection mode preference, with the base level of being in a space with someone—anyone. This could be followed by interacting in-person with someone who knows us; then with someone who likes us, and finally with someone with whom choose to share place and time. Formalized research is pending on this hypothesis, but we can note that in quarantine, all of this is impossible. Even through a glass window, we understand in person better than via a screen, and that virtual connections, be they voice or video call, rank below our desire for face-to-face interaction.
Virtual calls are better than no contact at all, until they are ubiquitous and incessant and observed by known and potentially unknown persons, and we find ourselves weary of virtual interactions and starved for in-person experience. Those who know of harder times—lack of communication during the Second World War, for example—try to remember that today is “not that bad, relatively speaking”. A relative perspective is helpful in the short run, but as we await a future with choice, we also wonder how place will help fill and heal this period of in-person starvation.
Sharing a space can provide an energy exchange or interpersonal sharing, even without physical contact. We feel the presence of another, with more senses engaged than in virtual connections. Surgeon Atul Gawande suggests that “we are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”
Matthew Lieberman, Professor of Psychology and Social Cognition at UCLA, states that our need to connect is as fundamental as our need for food and water. As we listen to our common language: “so great to see you” and “we need to be present” and “just be in the moment”, we can hear the starvation of mutual presence and the commensurate need for balancing interaction with quiet and focus. We miss the inherent value we feel when speaking with someone who makes us feel as if we are the only person there.
Face-to-face interaction commands attention, and as MIT Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology Sherry Turkle says, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.” Psychologist Daniel Goleman indicates “The social brain is in its natural habitat when we are talking with someone face-to-face in real time.” It is also important to keep in mind that our senses are attuned to picking up information about our environment in ways we may not yet understand. As Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett states, “Through prediction and correction, your brain continually creates and revises your mental model of the world.” We get information from reading people’s faces, and with masks it is much more difficult to interpret emotions and intent etc.- even with the expression of the eyes, people often struggle to understand when the view is partially obstructed. In virtual visual connection, we are restricted to two dimensions – sight and sound – causing short- and long-term concerns about what happens when interpersonal sensory input is restricted.
To build personal awareness and community, we need real-time authentic exchange without choreography. We need to be able to see and hear and engage and respond and await another’s immediate response. Such an experience communicates who we are, as Professor of Organizational Behavior Hillary Anger Elfenbein (of Washington University in St. Louis) indicates by stating that “our own way of being has an emotional signature,” one which can be discerned in person.
We discern others’ emotional signatures and ways of being within context, but when our place takes place a screen, context disappears, is minimal, or is manufactured – very much as if the interaction were all on a green screen. Outside of gaming and film viewing, in relationships with others we seek the authentic, not a well-produced setting. Prof. Sherry Turkle succinctly describes the risk here: “Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch: the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.”
Technology, as a tool, is designed to be an extension of human capability, not a replacement of our underlying social needs. Indeed, the very risk of social media in general is the un-human and un-healthy aspects of it: the always-on, lack of full transparency and authenticity, and continual checking that we engage in. As Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin indicates, “Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.” Despite the promotions of “join the conversation”, texting, posting, and email are a just faster forms of the handwritten letter– rather egocentric, with no immediate reaction perceived from our conversational counterpart, and no witnessed emotional response. It is a filtered, partial conversation. We become accustomed to the distance, the delay, the potential egocentricity, and fabrication – and we have discovered catfishing, ghosting, and trolling in return.
Privacy and confidentiality, too, are weakened by virtual interaction. A leader of a security organization once remarked to me that in-person communication provides the greatest control of privacy; it is the most secure environment for sharing information, without the implicit potential for eavesdropping and recording that technology presents.
The depth and richness of the experience in person in our shared places is akin to the difference that Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, highlights between the user experience of books as compared with films. Mr. Christian writes, “the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader.” The participant, as he notes, is involved when experiencing a written work, and is not an observer. While we do participate in online dialogues and interactions, we are limited to sight and sound and are often hindered by spotty internet service. Especially given that in today’s virtual calls we can often see our own reflections, we are in large part rendered an observer of our own interactions —which is not what we are wired for.
In person, there is a greater, more natural flow of conversation. It is easier to engage, and more difficult to disengage, than in online conversations. In person, we see, we talk, and we depart—no equipment or internet needed. Perhaps the machine influences us to truncate our virtual interactions and skip past normal pleasantries, offhand humor, and informal sharing as when an elevator shuts down conversation that might otherwise occur on a stair or escalator. Virtual Open Houses provide an opportunity for “drop-in” and serendipitous encounter, but the experience is not the same as fortuitously running into someone in the hallway.
There is no doubt that our connection through technology over the past year has been driven by the need for safety. The technology that enables this virtual connection existed before the pandemic, but often organizational cultures would not adopt it, except for the ability to work beyond the “normal business day.”. Technology has, in fact, improved from primitive video conferencing, where a single screen was transmitted from each end, and we missed quick eye flickers indicating engagement or distrust; yet it is still not as comprehensive as an in-person experience.
As a species, we have evolved in a physical, three-dimensional environment, and have developed skills for survival and thriving as such. Substituting that environment with a digital replica shifts the experience and may very well confuse our instincts. We do not see or experience the whole person, and we know not if they are messaging others, multitasking on another screen, or are actually engaged in the conversation. We would know all this information throughout each interaction if it were happening in person. In-person is real. Anything else is, quite frankly, not fully so.
We do not know the long-term impacts of this deprivation of in-person interaction, but for the present, we all acutely appreciate our inherent need for presence among other people. Technology has – brilliantly – untethered us from required attendance in a location, protected us from current risks of human contact, and enabled us to capture time lost in the commute. We have adapted for the time being and are thankful for the benefits of being able to connect through technology across distance and quarantine. We also need to become and remain acutely aware of the short- and long-term impacts of these many months of in-person deprivation, however—on individuals, on individual organizations, and on society as a whole.
Next week – we will explore the capabilities of place to address in-person starvation, including questions companies can ask themselves to define the solution of place.