26 Jun 09 @ 1:18 pm
Is it real or is it videoconferencing?
At a time when travel costs are being slashed like jungle growth run riot, videoconferencing has stood out as a, if not the low cost alternative to conducting business face-to-face. After all, isn’t videoconferencing, with its increasing quality and decreasing costs, the perfect substitute for face-to-face interaction?
Well…. maybe not. Videoconferencing is hard work; to be effective, it requires more attention and focus on the mechanics of conversation than face-to-face interaction. You’ve got to pay a bit more attention to the speaker’s speech rhythm and pauses so that you don’t interrupt. It’s not easy, which is why there are often those unnatural seconds of silence in videoconferencing, and why it’s not always clear when it’s your turn to speak. Speaker clarity is often a problem, which means you have to listen more closely to understand what is being said. And it is harder not to act a bit more formal during a videoconference – the medium often feels less natural, as does the flow of the conversation.
Because videoconferencing requires us to pay more attention to the mechanics of the conversation, we have less attention and brainpower to devote to the content. As a result, we tend to rely more on non-content cues to assess the effectiveness of the interaction – the speaker’s dress, looks, tone-of-voice, age, titles, etc. To put it another way, when using videoconferencing, as compared to face-to-face interaction, participants are more likely to assess the effectiveness of the interaction on the likeability of the speakers than on the content of what they said.
Sound a bit far-fetched? But that is exactly what two researchers found when they compared the assessments of a medical seminar between those who attended the seminar in person, and those who participated by videoconferencing. As they put it:
In this study, participants in the videoconference seminars reported being more influenced by how much they liked the speaker than by their assessment of the quality of the arguments presented, whereas those attending the seminar face-to-face reported just the opposite.
Interesting results, suggesting, not that we abandon videoconferencing – which isn’t going to happen anyway – but that we become a bit more cognizant of how we use it.
You can find the an abstract of the research here:
http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/9/1565
posted in category(s): Miscellaneous