Virtual Relationships

One of those things that makes me realize I’m from a past generation is the fact that I don’t have (and I almost never had) online friends. It’s not that I don’t use social networks, online forums or messaging apps. It’s just that all the friends I connect with virtually, I met them first in person. Even if I we first met each other through an online forum, we weren’t actually friends until we met in real-life.

Meeting people in real-life and especially talking to them helps you reduce a bias that’s super endemic to online communication. I always have a hard time finding its name or a proper link to share, but let me just describe it for now and you can point me to the proper info about it in the comments. Decades ago, in the times of ICQ, MSN and IRC, my brother used to say “All you read in the Internet is a lie”. He was cryptically referring to the fact that whenever you read something online, what you understand from it is mostly shaped by your vision and not by the writer’s intent, so most of the message is lost and/or misinterpreted. To reiterate something that I’ve read/watched multiple times online: if, for a particular message, all you have is a text, it’s up to your brain to complete the rest of the context information you would’ve naturally gathered from the speaker’s voice, tone, gestures, history, etc… should this have been an in-person conversation.

Knowing people in real-life, at the very least, allows you to read their messages in your mind with their own voices and expressions.

Even if you don’t actually met them

Remote Workers

But I happen to work in two companies with lots of remote workers:

InakaESI has multiple remote people working from different places (mostly Latin America, but also the US and even Spain)

Erlang Solutions is a multinational company with offices in different parts of Europe and, being Inaka part of it, Buenos Aires as well. Not only that but all offices have remote workers in different parts of the world.

So, for the last couple of years, even when I still had no virtual friend outside work, I had (and I still have) several virtual coworkers around the world. We communicate constantly over Hipchat, Skype, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, Slack, even sometimes on the phone as well. But that communication never fully replaces the experience of meeting them face-to-face.

Messaging on Hipchat or Slack still has the same problems described above. It lacks context and our brains are not happy with the lack of context, so they fill it in with something. And that something almost never matches the actual context the writer had when he wrote the message. I’ll give you an example: We have a fellow coworker at Erlang Solutions called Karol (you might know him from this blog post). For some reason, Karol sounds like a female name to most of us working from Buenos Aires. It didn’t actually have much of an impact, but until the first time we got on a call with him we read all his messages with a female voice. Sorry about that, Karol.

Actually talking through Skype, Hangout, GoToMeeting is an improvement, but then again…

Besides, if you’re thinking that having an online meeting will allow you to see other people’s expressions, consider this: I’ve been having two to twenty of these kind of meetings every week for years and I’m still waiting for the day I don’t have to turn off my camera at some point to be able to have a successful voice conversation with my interlocutors. Streaming video from multiple sources at a time is still a network intensive task and even for 1:1 meetings, at least in South America, streaming video is an unpredictable matter. Even if you get past those technical limitations, these things are still meetings, with agendas, scheduling, etc. You don’t have an impromptu conversation on Skype, like you would have near a physical coffee machine, do you?