2020 - The year we finally switched on the camera

In the 1960s and 1970s all the futuristic television shows and movies had cool versions of “video phones”.

They were an accepted part of our sci-fi-esque future state, along with matching tracksuits, flying cars and the ability to “beam up” rather than walk or drive.

The Jetsons had them. 2001 – A Space Odyssey had them. Every B-grade black-and-white space movie had them.

Star Trek’s Captain Kirk had the coolest video phone – large, full colour, high-definition screen with surround sound, and the ability to face-time random passing aliens at will.

I remember thinking as a child that it would be so cool in the future if we actually had video phones.

And then we got them...

When the “video phone” entered our lives, it was not the social revolution we had been expecting. In fact, it was more of a passe ripple.

It kind-of just happened. Overnight we had video capability on mobile phones, on computers and in meeting rooms with giant screens almost as good as Captain Kirk’s.

On almost any call or meeting we could beam in like a random passing alien and look people in the eye wherever they were around the world.

But mostly we didn’t…

By then we were already in social retreat. Phone calls had given way to emails and texting. Research showed humans had far fewer friends than in the past and much of our socialisation had been swallowed by a new time-poor reality.

The internet allowed us to hide in public and live our lives as a social media timeline, illustrated with carefully chosen pictures and witty observations about trivial things.

By then we had also moved away from the random drop-in.

When I was a child growing up in a country town, socialising consisted mostly of drop-ins. To the back door, not the front! You didn’t make appointments, you just dropped in. People expected it. They always had cake, just in case.

Today the drop-in is almost gone. In fact, I find I even make appointments to phone people now. Lives are not random. They are organised in half hour blocks controlled by Outlook. Mess with the schedule and you talk to the hand, or the voicemail.

Then came the pandemic…

In just a few weeks I have noticed a big change. When we were first forced into a corporate life dominated by unrelenting video chats and conference calls, meetings were mostly attended by giant initials surround by circles. Occasionally the initials were replaced with studio shots of people taken 10 years ago.

Then, bit by bit, the mouse sneaked over to the camera button and actual people started to appear.

And not just the usual corporate people in suits, smart dresses and salon-quality hair.

The corporate video world was full of people with home haircuts, work-in-progress grooming and self-styled dress codes framed with arbitrary acts of ordinary human life in the background.

It seemed like overnight corporate humans had emerged from behind a facade to reveal their true selves. The Wizard of Oz was out from the curtain to reveal he is just a regular man.

After a while even the fake Italian scenes and blurred backgrounds that sometimes cut off your ears started to switch off. 2020 became the year that we shared the real backdrops of our lives.

Here we were again. Humans acting like humans. Sometimes we even used this curious Star Trek technology to just drop in on someone. And it was okay. We didn’t even need to tell Outlook.

So, what does all this mean?

It might mean nothing. This whole period might just be a passing, slightly dreamlike, blip on the radar of our lives before we go about our business like there is nothing to see here.

Or maybe it is the time when the old world of socialising and the new world of real time digital connection merged into a new era of human eye-to-eye interaction.

People keep saying we are all in this together. The fact is that, as a human race, we have always been in everything together.

Now is the time to finally realise that, no matter where our desks sit in the world, our backgrounds look uncannily similar. And home haircuts are a universal global challenge.

Shane Rodgers is a writer and business executive with an unrelenting interest in human behaviour. These posts are personal and unrelated to my day job.