By way of my colleague Barry Cheung, today’s Sydney Morning Herald (“Videoconferences distort decisions, study finds“) points to the results of a study of video conferencing in which researchers indicate decisions can be distorted by the nature of the medium.
The research sample included “44 medical professionals who took part in early morning medical seminars via business-quality video links, and 99 peers who were in the room with the presenters.”
According to the study, the participants who were in the same room as the presenter were more likely to base their judgment on the content of their argument, whereas attendees of the videoconference were more likely to be influenced by the presenter’s charisma.
This led researchers to hypothesise that “a videoconference is mentally more challenging than a face-to-face meeting.”
Speaking from experience, this is quite true. Communicating via video or web conferencing introduces a new layer of complexity that has not only technical implications, but dynamic and interactive ones as well. It is a very different beast to meeting in person.
First and foremost, the technology introduces a distinct sense of separation between individuals. Unlike traditional meetings in which you can look directly at the person you’re speaking to, in web conferences you look at a screen depicting an image of the person you’re speaking to. On the surface this doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but consider the following.
A video image can go a long way to depicting a physical presence, however it does so from a different perspective than what you find in person – it also does it in 2 dimensions. When you factor in subtle lags in latency, which creates artificial gaps in the conversation – you find yourself in a situation that can feel both familiar and foreign or disjointed at the same time – much like a long distance phone call in which lag time causes callers to interrupt one another.
This is especially true with respect to non-verbal communication. During normal face-to-face interaction we are exposed to subtle non-verbal cues, which contribute a great deal to the flow of a conversation – such as crossed arms, fidgeting, relaxed body position, etcetera. In web conferences these cues are largely unseen, since we can often see only the head and shoulders of the audience – or in large meetings, not even that. Effectively a large portion of the conversation is not represented, which can make engaging with your audience difficult.
Speaking personally, as a result of this I find I start to inadvertently focus more and more on the cues that I can see – tone of voice, head movement, relative relaxation or nervousness – as if to make up for the cues I can’t see. Effectively this starts to place a greater emphasis on the manarisms of the presenter and a weaker emphasis on the argument itself. As the SMH indicates, this “leaves less brainpower…to process the content of the presentation.”
As powerful as web conferences are in bringing people together, they can provide only so much insight into a subject or presenter. Opportunities for reflection and asynchronous discussion of the same concepts must be available to ensure ideas can be explored from multiple perspectives and in different formats.
