As I write this, colleges in Taiwan are switching to online learning for the first time since the pandemic started. This is because, for most of the past year, Taiwan was able to contain the pandemic at the border. This past week, however, marks the first time ever that there has been sustained local transmission and it is currently unclear whether or not the government can get things back under control.

I actually started teaching online for the first time back in February. That’s because I’m officially on a one year leave from my university in Taiwan, while I serve as the “Chair of Taiwan Studies” at Leiden University. Starting so late in the game meant that I was able to ask my friends (most of whom already had one or two semesters of experience teaching online) for advice. Now, as my Taiwanese colleagues start teaching online for the first time, I shared what I had learned on social media. Seeing how popular my post was, I thought I’d clean it up a bit and share it here on the blog as well. Probably most readers have already been doing this for a while, and many may be getting ready to return to in-person classes in the fall, but hopefully this list (and the subsequent comments) will serve as a useful reference guide for anyone who needs it.

1. Do a survey at the start of the semester.

Ask students about their learning situation. Don’t be intrusive, but ask if they want to share anything about their setup or home life that might impact online learning. For instance, do they have a slow wifi? An old computer? A bad camera? Family or pets that might interfere? Etc. This should be an optional question on the survey, but it gives them a chance to tell you early on, so you know what to expect and can help them if you need to. For students who have been doing online classes for a while, you can also ask them what they like or don’t like about online learning. What has worked for them in other classes? What has driven them crazy?

2. Set up a chat room for the class, one that actually works.

The chat features in most video conferencing software as well as those in most “learning management systems” (LMS) are very poorly designed. It helps a lot to use something that is set up from the beginning just for chat. If your students already use something, like WhatsApp, you could go with that, but I used Discord which students liked. Keep it open during class, and set it up to send notifications when you are logged off.

3. Share a document.

There are a number of apps now, such as Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, Notion, etc. that allow multiple people to edit a document at the same time. Open one up and share it with the class for each lesson. I recommend throwing your lecture notes in there and then having the students comment on that or add their own notes as you go. You can do this in addition to a powerpoint presentation, or instead of one (as I did).

4. Use breakout rooms.

In my own survey I asked students what they hated most about online learning and they said it was the lack of interaction with other students. After each lecture I used breakout rooms and had them discuss amongst each other, writing their thoughts and comments either in the shared document or in the chat room for the class.

5. Make time for one-on-one meetings with students.

Or, in a large class, with small groups. This allows you to get to know students better, despite everything being online. (This was something I hadn’t planned initially, but the students asked for it in the survey.)

6. Have students keep an online journal.

Encourage students to read and comment on each other’s journals. This helps to create a sense of shared experience that is often missing in online learning.

7. Stick around at the end of each class.

This gives people a chance to have a quick meeting with you without having to sign up for office hours.Don’t log out till the last student has logged out.

8. Start each class with a music video.

Play something nice while you are waiting for everyone to login. If you play good music, students will want to log in early so as not to miss it.

Other suggestions? Share in the comments.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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A College Community of (COVID) Consociated Contemporaries

by Christian Elliott

On Thursday, March 12th, I piled into a rental van with a dozen other student writing tutors from Augustana, a small liberal arts college in western Illinois. We were bound for the Midwest Writing Center Association’s annual conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After a few hours of cornfield-lined interstate, we pulled into the DoubleTree hotel’s parking garage. We crowded into an elevator, joking about the oatmeal cookie smell in the air, courtesy of the Quaker Oats factory next door. COVID-19 had started to make national news, but still felt far away from Iowa’s second-largest city. We knew something was wrong, though, when we entered a deserted hotel lobby devoid of the Midwestern writing nerds we’d been expecting. Our faculty chaperone logged onto a hotel computer to check his email—sure enough, the conference had been cancelled due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, just an hour before it was scheduled to begin. With time to kill, we wandered around the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art admiring Grant Wood paintings, then all gathered around one table in a local restaurant for dinner. Sharing a restaurant table with others now is a strange and unsettling thought. I haven’t seen those twelve colleagues and friends (except in Zoom calls)—and have rarely left my family’s home—since that night. That weekend, Augustana announced classes would move online for the remainder of the term.

The front of the t-shirt that Augustana College mailed me reads “Class of 2020: We Made History.” I’m not sure how likely graduating via a YouTube video from a small liberal arts college in Illinois during a pandemic is to make the history books, but it’s a nice sentiment. Today, as I sit in my room scanning job boards and LinkedIn pages back at my childhood home in Iowa, I find myself reflecting on how radically my college experience changed in the three short months leading up to graduation. Now, with time to think, I’ve been reading social science research in an attempt to put into words, from the perspective of a recent college graduate, how different “distance learning” felt and why the success of current and future college students depends on a return to in-person learning as soon as is safely possible.

In the early 20th century, Austrian phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz coined the terms “consociates” and “contemporaries” to describe the differences between direct face-to-face social interactions (copresence) and indirect, mediated relationships (noncopresence) respectively (1967). Schutz believed face-to-face relationships possessed a directness, a vividness of experience not otherwise possible in indirect interactions. A group of college students sharing a classroom (or a rental van) as consociates grow older together, if just for an hour, and experience each other’s consciousnesses in an intimate continuous way until the moment they go their separate ways. The instant they separate, they exit the world of each other’s direct experiences and become contemporaries. As soon as I stepped out of the crowded van and left college and my friends behind, I was a slightly different person. As the weeks passed, I had new experiences and gained new perspectives—I began to possess a new self, different from the “yesterday self” that lives on in the memory of those I’ve left behind. I certainly possess a different self now than the one left in a Cedar Rapids restaurant with my fellow tutors almost five months ago when we last saw one another in person.

Schutz was inspired to make these distinctions because in his time, indirect and increasingly anonymous social interactions were becoming more and more common—a person could have relationships with people they read about in newspapers, with collective entities’ unknown individual members, or via telephone with people they’d met in person in the past. Contemporaries are people with whom one knows one coexists but does not experience directly anymore. In 2004, sociologist Shanyang Zhao coined the term “consociated contemporaries” to describe a novel emerging “mediated social realm” he observed—“cyberspace” communities in which individuals may share a community of time without sharing a community of physical space. For the first time, space had been torn away from place—instead of being physically present to interact with others, people could communicate “face-to-device” in what he called “telecopresence,” a condition of “electronic proximity” through which they remained within reach of the “mediated senses” of others extended by computers (Zhao 2004). We take these types of interactions for granted now, but to phenomenological sociologists in the early 21st century, they represented a dramatic restructuring of the social conditions of communication.

As an unintentional online college student this past semester, I spent long hours at my desk with a cup of coffee, sending dozens of emails, posting to discussion forums, sharing my essays online, and meeting for Zoom advising sessions. When I replied to fellow students’ forum posts, I interacted with them through telecopresence—our two separate “worlds within mediated reach” coincided briefly, and we spoke to one another, however asynchronously, with written words as consociated contemporaries. Yet, in doing so the flow my consciousness was always split—part of me was synchronized with the other student in telecopresence, while part of me remained in my room, at my desk, synchronized with my family, with whom I share my home and a relationship of corporeal copresence. We experienced, to use a term coined by biolinguist John L. Locke, “being alone together” (Locke 1998). Since Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, artists have used the term to try to capture the isolated experience of being together but alone, especially in cities. Sherry Turkle used the term to explain how technology (social media) replaces actual human connection with an unsatisfying simulacrum—McDonaldizing friendship (Bakardjieva 2014). The same phrase has now become a favorite hashtag of my college’s social media account managers and now carries even more meaning. Being alone together in this new way—communicating only through the internet—is a complicated experience, and one that has destroyed the work/home life binary. We’re all “BBC dad” now, a recent New York Times article claimed, providing some recommendations for how to prevent distractions created by children and pets in video conference calls. As a remote learner, suddenly I could no longer share a classroom with my fellow students—instead, we all lived in our own, distant physical worlds and the online one maintained through electronic mediation at the same time. We were simultaneously “linked to and buffered from” one another in complicated and challenging new ways.

More recent studies of communication, like Zhao’s, which address online interactions, have largely affirmed Alfred Schutz’s “pro-proximity” stance for the superiority of direct face-to-face interaction. Spoken language possesses an “inherent quality of reciprocity” and comes with a “rich array of bodily indices” that make face-to-face interactions uniquely reciprocally synchronous (1967). Nevertheless, the development of online communication technologies represents a fundamental change, a “new normative order” of social interaction (Zhao 2004). Electronic mediation changes both the structure and conditions which lie beneath all symbolic exchange. Through distance learning, students have been forced to navigate these new and complicated realities. For the last three months of spring semester we, along with students in colleges across the country, functioned as a community of consociated contemporaries, creating knowledge together in real time through brief connections facilitated by our laptops and internet connections. We perhaps defied Alfred Schutz’s dated definitions, but we certainly felt the loss of our pure consociate relationships with one another. To grow older with other like-minded individuals, to directly experience the sheer diversity of others—each with their own perspectives and backgrounds—in the same classroom, is a special thing, and a sad one to lose.

Some might argue that our proven capacity to learn at distance means the kind of college experience liberal arts schools like Augustana offers is overpriced and irrelevant. The Harvard Business Review, in a recent article claimed that basic-level college courses (think big lecture halls) already lack a face-to-face “social experience,” and could easily be replaced with videos and forums to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and save students time. Other articles have reconsidered old arguments for McDonaldizing college through “modularized and gamified” online programs and “boot camps”—more fiscally sensible replacements for expensive in-person college. Furthermore, the economic crisis and demand for room and board refunds have jeopardized some schools’ endowments, and others have opted not to admit a freshmen class this fall. Nationwide, colleges are set to lose $23 billion in revenue, and small private institutions are among the hardest it. Is online the inevitable future of higher education?

I’ve heard from some of my Augustana classmates, through video chat and text conversations, that they actually preferred the online class format—it was less of a time commitment they told me, you didn’t have to get dressed to “go” to class, and no one knew if you were scrolling through social media instead of watching a lecture online or responding to a forum quiz. As children of the internet, current college students are, in a way, uniquely prepared to learn online. Research has shown 95% of teenagers own smartphones today, a significant increase from just a decade ago, and 45% are online “almost constantly.” Though social scientists have been slow to take online relationships seriously, they’ve now begun studying how critical the internet is to teenage identity formation. In a 2005 follow-up paper to the “consociated contemporaries” article, Shanyang Zhao develops the concept of the “digital self,” constructed through online interaction. To make his point, Zhao builds on a long tradition of symbolic interactionism traceable to sociologist Charles Cooley. In 1902, Cooley described how our conception of who we are develops through our interactions with other people—we present ourselves to them and “come to know ourselves” by how they react to us. As a teenager, I know my identity was generated partially online. I’ve maintained an online relationship with my best friend, who lives on the other side of the country, for over a decade. I’ve laughed at and shared memes my parents couldn’t begin to understand—they bristle at “okay boomer.” I had my first email address in middle school—online communication is second nature to me and to my peers. I faced few significant issues completing assignments, peer reviewing papers, and watching video lectures online.

Nevertheless, I find my fellow liberal arts school students’ affinity for online learning concerning. I faced questions when I first chose Augustana as a high school senior and soon to be “undecided major”—why spend thousands of dollars to attend a small liberal arts college when I didn’t even know what career I aspired towards? My father went to a trade school and my mother a large state university for a very specific program, and neither exactly saw the appeal (though they were supportive). I didn’t even know what a liberal arts school was until I visited, but once I did, I was sold on the concept and it’s safe to say my college experience would not have had the same trajectory otherwise. Over the past four years I’ve tried new things and experimented widely—taking classes in geography, French, philosophy, and Muslim literature—before finally finding cultural anthropology. Online, I would have missed the irreplaceable chance hallway encounters and drop-in doorway conversations with my professors (during which I made many decisions about my education), the camaraderie of the cafeteria table, the clubs and organizations (like Lives of the Mind), the late nights, the field trips, the annual ritualistic rites of passage. There’s more to a college experience than efficiency, than acquiring credentials and receiving knowledge—young adults like me need four years with one another to grow as people and lifelong learners if we are to succeed in this rapidly changing world. Once the pandemic ends, one way or another, in-person residential college must continue if future students like me are to experience the rich, face-to-face education that I have at Augustana.

The Harvard Business Review authors, later in their article, cite a number of barriers to ending face-to-face learning for good. IT infrastructure does not currently exist at the scale necessary for widespread online learning, and video conference software can’t deliver the same “personalized experience” that face-to-face classes can. Furthermore, they admit, students can’t learn as efficiently online because of multi-tasking/attention span issues. Digital divides remain a problem too—online learning amplifies the gulf between rich and poor students, and faculty often aren’t prepared to teach with new technology online. This fall, as many schools plan to offer hybrid online/in-person programs, low-income students are predicted to fall behind. Despite these challenges online classes are, for now, the only safe option. Professors at my college, despite their passion for in-person teaching, have taken to Twitter recently to share their concerns about being forced by administrators to teach face-to-face in addition to online this fall. Donald Trump’s administration has pressured schools to reopen immediately. I care deeply about in-person education, but now is too soon.

Years ago, experts predicted “massive open online courses” would kill residential universities, yet face-to-face college education has “stood the test of time.” Following this pandemic and corresponding massive uptick in online education adoption (with teachers transforming their curriculums and new infrastructure being constructed), it seems likely that more colleges than ever will continue to offer online alternatives permanently. I agree with those who have argued, convincingly, that small institutions dedicated to deep relationships between faculty and students (think liberal arts schools) must continue post-pandemic, because online education misses “the human touch,” and “…those colleges that survive (with strong and supportive communities) will become more attractive as students will crave their focus on learning and the attention they give to each and every student.” For now, teachers can only do their best cultivate human connection online (even at the expense of course content, some have urged). Doubtless, regardless of how the pandemic plays out, the debate between commoditized online and slower, less “efficient” in-person education will continue. But as I’ve learned, a college community of consociated contemporaries cannot learn together, cannot grow older together, in the rich, deep way that students sharing a campus face-to-face can.

References:

Bakardjieva, Maria. 2014. “Social Media and the McDonaldization of Friendship.” De Gruyter Mouton.

Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. NY: Scribner’s.

Locke, John L. 1998. Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore: The De-Voicing of Society. New York: Touchstone.

Schutz, Alred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2004. “Consociated Contemporaries as an Emergent Realm of the Lifeworld: Extending

Shutz’s Phenomenological Analysis to Cyberspace.” Human Studies 27: 91-105.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28(3): 387-405.

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Video conferencing and the limits of representability

by Christian Elliott

It is Friday the 13th of March. Not a particularly auspicious day, as it would turn out, though I’ve never been particularly superstitious. I am sitting at a long seminar table in a small classroom in Old Main, the pale-yellow stone bell tower-topped academic building at the center of Augustana College’s wooded campus in western Illinois. Around me are my classmates, anthropology and sociology students I’ve known for four years now. There is energy in the room as we discuss each other’s research papers—in less than two weeks, we’ll be reading them aloud to a room full of undergraduate and graduate anthropology students at a regional conference, and we must be ready. There’s something else in the air too, though, a sense of uncertainty. While we talk about theory and data, our thoughts are elsewhere, in Seattle and in New York, where the number of confirmed coronavirus cases grows by the day. Just two days ago, national sports leagues cancelled their seasons, Tom Hanks tested positive for COVID-19, and markets plunged around the world. The conference might be canceled, our professor warns us, but we’ll be back together on Monday. We’ll have each other. And if worst comes to worst, we’ll still be able to present our research on campus in May.

It is Monday the 30th of March. I am sitting at a table in my room, books and papers strewn around me. It is time for class, and I am wearing my pajamas. The video call blinks to life and a grainy image of my anthropology professor’s bearded face appears as the internet connection and pixels struggle to approximate his likeness on my laptop screen. I say “hello,” rubbing at the bags under my eyes and sliding on my glasses. His voice comes through my speakers in response:

“Huh, that’s weird, I can’t hear you.”

“Uh oh,” I say. It’s not particularly surprising. I tell him to try refreshing the browser window and rejoining the call. Of course, he can’t hear me say this. The program tries to turn my words into captions, which appear at the bottom of the screen next to a picture of my face that looks a little bit like me—it was taken a long time ago, in what feels like a different life. The captions say something about milk and rejuvenating a cat. Nice try, Google Meet. I send a text message through the program instead and hear a “ding” from his end (which has come out of his speakers, into his microphone, through the internet, and back out of my speakers) as he receives it, squinting at the screen, his face too close to the webcam. His face blinks away and then back as he does as I suggested. Voila, we can hear each other. By now some of my classmates have joined the call too. I can see their faces, their messy hair, their bedrooms and kitchens in the background. Through my speakers from one of their far away worlds I hear a baby crying; from another, a dog barking. Just over a week before, during our spring break, the governor of Illinois signed an executive order requiring all residents to stay in their homes. With school closed indefinitely, this is our reality from now on. We won’t be back in that small classroom together ever again. None of us are sick, but we are all anxious, frustrated, and tired. Our professor tells us the presentations are off, so we can just turn our papers in to him at the end of the term. We’ll stay in touch regularly using video conferencing—it’ll be “just like” seeing each other in person.

Google Hangouts Meet is required software in many of my classes. The college’s Reading/Writing Center, for which I work as a peer tutor, has also adopted Meet for tutoring sessions as the “closest approximation of what we do in person.” As children of the internet, we current college students are, in a way, uniquely prepared to learn online. My fellow classmates were frequent video-chat users pre-quarantine, using either Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype, or Google’s Hangouts, to talk to one another, family, and friends while away at school. Now, Zoom cocktail hours and Netflix parties have joined the list of virtual activities. Tech companies boast video-chat users can be “in two places at once,” and can speak “face-to-face” just as they would in person. How true is that claim? How is all the video conferencing we’re doing as a result “social distancing” (which we should really call “physical distancing,” to avoid implying we should stop communicating with one another) affecting us? The Harvard Business Review, in a recent article claimed the “crisis-driven experiment” of distance learning raises questions about whether students “really need a four-year residential experience.” Lectures don’t require “human interaction,” the authors suggest, and could be “commoditized” as multi-media presentations or video conferences. Can video conferencing and online learning replace face-to-face higher education? As a student of the social sciences, I often turn to sociological or anthropological theory in an attempt to make sense of phenomena I can’t begin to understand on my own. Phenomenology, the study of lived experience, seems like a natural place to start to illuminate the inherent complexity in what’s become a mundane quarantine staple—the video-chat. 

Scholars of communication—dating to Alfred Shutz, half a century ago—have long favored face-to-face interaction over all other forms (e.g. the telephone, telegram, and written word). This “pro-proximity” stance deemed other forms of contact “derivative” and “inferior.” Shutz explained this dynamic in terms of “gradations of immediacy”—the more “symptoms of the conscious life” that flow between communication interlocutors through a given technology, the more direct that relationship is (1967). When video-chat software first became commercially available, phenomenologists like Shanyang Zhao suggested that even with this more “embodied” form of “face-to-device” computer mediated communication (CMC), only a “limited amount of nonverbal cues can be gleaned from voice and image transmitted over distances” (2005). In 2001, computer scientist and virtual reality expert Jaron Lanier similarly wrote that “video conferencing seems precisely configured to confound” the nonverbal elements of human interaction. Despite the proliferation of video-chat and conferencing since then, scholarly still largely see video-chatting as a fundamentally different type of communication from genuine face-to-face interaction. Several recent phenomenological sociology studies have addressed video-chat and conferencing in depth. The main question asked is one of belief—whether video calls can actually give the impression of being physically present with the person you’re speaking to. Past studies, sociologist Ferencz-Flatz summarizes, have revealed the answer to be largely one of “existential disappointment” (2018). 

Video conferencing certainly has advantages when compared to other CMC technologies. It allows us to experience the “sheer communicative persona” of the speaker (look, tone, body language) such that communication can occur even without either person speaking (Ferencz-Flatz 2018). It also connects two lived environments, two “worlds within mediated reach” (Zhao 2004). Video-chat doesn’t actually fuse together the separate concrete situations it connects, however—instead, it generates a “novel form of intersubjective context, a new sort of “composite social environment” (Ferencz-Flatz 2018). When I connect with a regular tutee (one I used to meet with on campus) for a virtual writing center tutoring session, our respective worlds do not become one as they do when he walks into the physical writing center and sits down at my table. We speak over each other, then both try to let the other person speak and end up speaking at the same time again. The tiniest fraction of a second of internet latency throws off the cadence of our conversation. Additionally, the flow our consciousnesses splits—part of each of us is synchronized with the other, while the other part remains in our separate rooms, at our separate desks, synchronized with our separate families with whom we share our homes. I always feel tired after a day of online classes, and I don’t even have a daycare full of children in my house or five barking dogs or busy railroad tracks in my backyard, as I know some of my classmates do. Psychologists have deemed this sense video-chat exhaustion “Zoom Fatigue.” Sociology has another answer—the very act of simultaneously generating two separate “subjective meaning contexts” can be difficult (Zhao 2004).

In the virtual writing center session I also find myself intensely aware of the large flag of South Africa displayed on my tutee’s wall and the pile of laundry in the corner of the room in the background. This increased awareness of life’s backgrounds led The New York Times to produce several articles recently with recommendations for how to “look your best” in video conferences. Of course, my tutee is also aware of the background he’s sharing with me and can control his “presentation of self” by making changes to the microphone and camera. In large class video conferences, for example, I’ve noticed students often mute their microphones by default, only unmuting them to “raise their hand” in a request to speak. This change in control represents a “radical inversion” of normal communication situations because the interlocutors actually “take over the kinesthetic gestures of the other” in their interaction (Ferencz-Flatz 2018). Underlying the interaction is this base level presupposition of communication that each interlocutor is filming his/herself for the other. Furthermore, in a video conference (as opposed to in a face-to-face conversation) we must watch ourselves speaking as we speak and watch one another as we watch ourselves watch one other. In doing so, I experience the same sort of discomfort as when I hear or see myself in a recording—I’m presented with an “exclusively external perspective” of myself in real time (Ferencz-Flatz 2018). The shape of the “communicative world” of our conversation is dramatically changed from what it was in person.

It’s worth addressing another small but fundamental was in which video-chat conversations rework the dynamics of social engagement. As sociologist Norm Friesen describes, video-chats disrupt a basic type of interaction that underlies all communication—“mutually enfolding gazes” (2014). In face-to-face conversations, intensive mutual reciprocal eye contact aligns two people perceptually. Eye contact is a way of indicating that your interlocutor is “attending to your attention while you are attending to hers” (Friesen 2014). Sartre once wrote “I see myself because somebody sees me.” As a core part of human communication, eye contact has “layers or moments of perceptivity and receptivity.” You can feel yourself being observed, and you tend to believe your gaze is “felt” by others you look at, even momentarily. As anyone who’s ever “felt” someone’s eyes on them knows, gazes have a power, a “tactile force.” That force is noticeably absent from video-chats for a simple reason—given the different positions of cameras and screens, simultaneous reciprocal eye contact is physically impossible. You can make it look like you’re making eye contact with the other person by looking into the camera but doing so precludes actually looking at the person’s eyes on the screen. Both people feel the other is looking at them only when they actually aren’t. To experience this entirely different mutual awareness firsthand, simply try “pinning” one person’s video image onscreen in a multi-person video conference. For me at least, doing so produces immediately strange feeling of “spying,” like looking at a person while concealed by sunglasses. They should be able to see you staring, but they can’t. As a result, there’s an awareness that you must be “always on” and “larger than life-size”—if you pick your nose, all twenty people in the video-chat could be watching you do it (Friesen 2014). There’s no way to tell whose attention is directed at you, and when—you’re observed and, in a way, objectified in the eyes of those with whom you’re communicating.

Video conferences are also an “all or nothing” social space—attendants are either “there” or not (Friesen 2014). Take the example of a 10-person video conference I attended for writing center training recently. I opened my email and clicked a link to join the conference and was immediately thrust into the call with a “ding” as Google Meet announced my presence to the others already in the conference room and talking with one another. Others appeared shortly thereafter, each bringing with them what Friesen calls characteristics of their “separate auditory environments.” Every time our writing center director activated his mic, we all heard the banging of workers outside his home doing repairs. When he announced the end of the class an hour later the conference abruptly ended, with person after person disappearing without a trace or transition. Proponents of video conferencing as an alternative to regular, face-to-face business meetings might see this placeless efficient spontaneity as an advantage, but Friesen explains the problems with this idea. Hallways and conference rooms are not simply ways of getting to meetings—they are “spaces of habitual traversal” through which meeting attendees “converge” on their purpose mentally and physically (Friesen 2014). Transitional “threshold” spaces for informal communication and improvisation are actually critically important for productivity, Friesen argues. The classroom is not necessarily the most important space for learning on campus; the “getting there” spaces (hallways, coffee shops, the quad) are necessary too. The apartness inherent in “Distance Learning” means college students like me can no longer walk out of the meeting with the writing center director to get a coffee and casually discuss a new idea for a project that wasn’t appropriate to talk about in the meeting, or talk about a new philosophical concept with friends while walking out of class. This “all or nothing” nature of video conferences is an emblem of the sort of efficiency-focused, commoditized online education the Harvard Business Review article authors would like to see—the writing center is distilled into its core effect—45-minute virtual sessions focused on improving papers—with time for rapport-building chit-chat or long casual conversations.

Video conferencing is not an online education panacea. It does not provide a magical extension of the self into remote realms, enabling cheaper, more efficient learning. Instead, it disrupts and distorts the self, body, and standard pedagogies. As my anthropology professor recently said using Google Meet’s chat feature, his face frozen on my screen, “I hate     this!1!” Technical media have indeed, as Friesen argues, run up against a limit of representability (2014). From a phenomenological perspective, “mediating the immediate” is an impossible task—at best, gazes and voices are “reflected and refracted as if in a rudimentary hall of mirrors and echo chamber.” We’ll all feel better when we can exit the funhouse and see each other’s real faces and hear each other’s real voices once again.

References:

Ferencz-Flatz. 2018. “Ten theses on the reality of video-chat: A phenomenological account.” De Gruyter Mouton.

Friesen, Norm. 2014. “Telepresence and Tele-absence: A Phenomenology of the (In)visible Alien Online.” Phenomenology & Practice 8(1): 17-31.

Lanier, Jaron. 2001. “Virtually There: Three-dimensional tele-immersion may eventually bring the world to your desk. Scientific American. 

Schutz, A. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2004. “Consociated Contemporaries as an Emergent Realm of the Lifeworld: Extending Shutz’s Phenomenological Analysis to Cyberspace.” Human Studies 27: 91-105.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28(3): 387-405.

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