Tue, 12:54: I've been thinking of video chat, and how the evolution of our approach to it seems to have been turbocharged by the pandemic.
Before video chat, or "video phones," existed, they were portrayed in science fiction as a ubiquitous and default form of communication to be expected in our future. What none of those novel and script writers thought to predict was how many people would wind up keeping their cameras turned off because they didn't want to be seen in their pajamas or with bedhead.
But! We've now spent nearly a year enduring a flood of mandatory time on the likes of Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, etc, effectively forcing acclimation by sudden immersion.
So, "Zoom fatigue" notwithstanding, my prediction is that once we are past all the COVID quarantining, we of course won't be video chatting as much as we had to during the pandemic—but, going forward, we will still be doing video chat much more often than we would be had the pandemic never happened. Probably more so in the professional realm than the personal, but it will be increased either way, now that we're all basically used to it.
And I'm fine with that. As a general rule, if I cannot actually visit someone in person—whether it's geographic distance or something else keeping us apart—given a choice, I still prefer video chat over just talking on the phone. It feels like a much closer approximation of actually hanging out together.
