Why Videoconferencing Won't Replace Phone Calls

Videoconferencing got a splashy rollout - dedicated hardware, press releases, media hype, and heavy-breathing articles about how we'd all be face-to-face.  In 1964, at the Seattle World's Fair.

It still hasn't happened, has it?

Now the technology infrastructure - and the gear - exist to make videoconferencing widespread. PCs come with teeny cameras, broadband has passed 50% penetration in the US (or what passes for broadband in the US). Non-dedicated hardware, press releases, media hype and more heavy breathing.

It still hasn't happened, has it?

There's something very appealing about the notion of videoconferencing. The logic goes something like this. We're very visual, and we're used to live conversation. Body language is very important. Moving pictures restore that dimension of communicating. To be fair, videconferencing has definitely made headway, and found some uses. But it's not about to put the audio telephone out of business - and, we'll submit, it won't ever put the audio telephone out of business.

If you wanted to argue with me about this article, would you rather

a) have a live conversation about it

b) call me and verbally duke it out, or

c) stand in front of a screen with no sound and have a mutual hand-waving contest?

The answer's pretty obvious. The live conversation is probably best, but, no question, the silent video connect is definitely worst.  There's a clue there about videoconferencing.

If you had any "communications" courses in high school or college, you probably learned the concept of different personal space 'zones' in different cultures. In American culture, for example, we prefer a distance of a foot or more for social interaction. Anything closer than a foot feels like "personal space" to us. Conversely, a 6-8 feet starts to feel like public speaking.  If you've ever conversed with someone from a culture with a different sense of personal space - say, Europe - you may have felt uncomfortable with the proximity they preferred.

The key point is to think about the concept of personal space as it relates to audio and video.

There's a funny thing about telephones, in relation to personal space. Telephones are incredibly intimate. The relative space between the speaker's lips and the listener's ears is tiny - we are practically whispering to one another.

Have you ever been speaking on the phone while someone in the room tries to carry on a different conversation with you? In that case, the telephone conversation usually dominates - it's almost impossible to attend to the person talking from across the room when someone else is talking in your ear.

It's not because of acoustic volume - it's because of space. The telephone conversation is happening in intimate space. The in-room conversation is occuring in social or in public space. The psychological circuit-breaker automatically favors the more intimate conversation.

Now let's look at videoconferencing. The high-dollar conference room videoconf systems of a few years ago were - to put it politely - horrible. Leave aside the cost and complexity, and just look at them in human terms. What they tended to offer was an increase in audio space in return for visual space. Most of them used speakerphones - the assumption being "group to group" meetings. The intimate audio space of the phone call got replaced with the bad-Klaxon experience of the speakerphone.

On top of that, the flat 2-d videoconference experience was (and is) demonstrably NOT the same thing as being in the same place. Videoconferencing is about what you each see in the camera, not about being in the same place. Latency (delay) may be getting tolerable, and picture quality may be improving - but it's still a social-distance experience.

There's a second issue that's specifically visual, but incredibly important, that makes videoconferencing problematic: eye contact.

The natural pattern for a 1/1 conversation is to sit at right angles, and to punctuate the conversation with body language and eye contact. Eye contact is reserved for really important points or perception-checks. (Only movie lovebirds gaze into each others' eyes.)

Can you make eye contact via videoconferencing? No.

The camera may be right at the top of the screen - and the other party's picture right below it. But that primal human look-'em-in-the-eye connection is prohibited. It sounds like a little thing, but from a human-communications perspective, it's huge. Someone who evades your gaze like this in real life comes off as shifty, untrustworthy, unengaged. Why do we think it's going to work on screen?

Someone may decide to solve these problems. They may crank out an LCD screen with a tiny hole punched top-center. They may mount the screen on a gimbal, so turning your head turns the screen. These aren't the right choices for a computer but may be the right choices for effective visually-augmented-communication-at-a-distance.

Until then...happy to be proven wrong, but video conferencing will continue to be "still hasn't happened." It's not a technology challenge - it's a how-we-work challenge. If you see something great, let us know.