I've been on the lookout for signals in this wild storm and offer a few early comments. They aren't terribly well thought-out, so take them with a grain of salt and in the spirit of encouraging those who are more observant of change.
Society didn't screech to a complete halt when an army of workers and students went home. Communication services on the Internet are providing connection for most of us, but perhaps the nature of what we're doing is shifting. People seem to be valuing voice or video one-to-one links over text messages and email. We're spending more time talking to people we haven't connected with in awhile. Synchronicity with the rich non-verbal communication that comes with vocal inflections and the visual physical mannerisms that we're wired to understand are suddenly valuable again. It's not as good as real presence, but with the mistakes, pauses, silences, emotion and even the electric excitement of authentic human conversation it's the best many of us have.
Unedited imperfect personas facilitated by a network connection. Authentic communication rather than the heavily edited unauthentic asynchronous online personas of FaceBook and Instagram. Apart, but not alone. What an inefficient use of attention :-)
A belief I've held since I began to work with anthropologists and sociologists 25 years ago is human relationships are necessarily inefficient. Think about walking on on a sidewalk in the Winter covered with freezing rain and the same sidewalk in the Summer - enough friction is a feature. The drive for efficiency in many social tools ignores the need for social friction. We've been trained to be inauthentic online.
Are we witnessing a shift? If so will it last?
We need to make choices and perhaps now we're getting an opportunity. Zoom is clearly more efficient and may be preferable to normal meetings for some, but what is the balance and purpose of your connection? We should think about that. I worry that some will see online education as "better" - I won't go into it here, but consider that disastrous for many fields. And then there are personal assistants - I'm in agreement with Sherry Turkle: we need to think carefully about their place and the tech community is intellectually underpowered to tackle the thorny questions.
One more thing. Some of us are finding a bit more time on our hands. Be on the lookout for serendipity and seize it appears. I was lucky this week and will keep looking.
Stay well and stay safe!
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