We can all agree that the internet is mostly an extremely good thing and has generally enriched our lives as a medium that has fostered a greater level of connectivity and interactivity between human beings worldwide. As a complementary tool to the burgeoning plethora of communication platforms – sms, mobile phone, videophone – it evidently enhances our capacity to interact with each other .
However, the problems start when we start to use the net as a substitute for physical interaction. Dr Thomas Lewis, with his particular expertise in neurobiology has used the psychobiology of emotion and human relationships to try and establish the relationship between the physical presence and the capacity to communicate precise and detailed information. Face-to-face communications, it seems, are the best way to get across intense information in business.
The main tenor of Dr Thomas Lewis's argument is that we are deluding ourselves if we think that text-based communications are as rich and informative as communicating a message face-to-face. He has amassed a lot of empirical evidence to support his proposition:
We never had to learn to process body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. We evolved this capability...it's innate. But we had to spend years learning to read and write with any level of sophistication. The brain needs and expects these other--more significant--channels of information, and when they don't come... the brain suffers (and so does the communication). And the problem goes way beyond just an increased chance for misinterpretation.
Part of the issue they've discovered in research is just how crucial the immediate response is. In still-face effect experiements with infants, for example, they learned that babies become immediately distressed when their mother maintains a "still face" that does not show any response/feedback with what the baby is doing. This makes sense, but what's really interesting is when they experimented with video. In some of these variations on the still-face effect, mothers and babies were on closed-circuit monitors where they could each see each other in real-time, through a television monitor. The babies were much happier when their mother's face was responsive to their own... less distressed than when the mother was does right in front of the baby but maintaining a still face!
Dr Thomas Lewis then goes on to summarise his findings that, grosso modo, stress the importance of face to face encounters in terms of the responsiveness they elicit, the rich contextual nature of visual information that is exchanged as well as the almost primeval need to share the same physical space as other human beings.
Well, we at citycita couldn't agree more with the conclusions of this paper. In fact, the raison d'etre of our site, is to provide an interface that fuses the virtual world with the physical world. We believe that in our present era where we interact freely and openly on the net but don't even know our next door neighbour's name we can use the connectivity of the virtual world to lubricate the cogs of physical interaction that we have all but forgotten.
Fola
