What Is Lost and Gained When We Communicate Virtually?

When linguist and journalist Gretchen McCullough wanted to have a virtual party with a group of friends she was disappointed at how little resemblance it bore to the in-person parties she’d previously enjoyed. Video-meeting technology, she found, could not replicate the fluid mingling between conversations and people that happen at in-person events in a shared room. She missed being able to serendipitously strike up a conversation while standing around a food table; nor could she pick up on the nuances of another person’s gestures or facial expressions to gauge their emotions. 

Similar disappointment with virtual interactions can happen during remote work. To state the obvious, one of the challenges with remote work is the fact that we do not meet in person, face-to-face. Digital communication, in one form or another, is an attempt to remedy that challenge either by duplicating as much as possible what we achieve in face-to-face communication or by offering an alternative form of communication with benefits unachievable in person. 

But why is face-to-face communication so powerful? And what exactly is lost when we communicate virtually?

One way to frame the problem is to look at what social scientists call social presence. Face-to-face contact is considered the gold standard for social presence. But when in-person interactions are not available, we can turn to social presence to define the degree to which specific media do or do not convey social cues via voices or facial expressions. Because let’s face it, voices and facial expressions, as well as body language, can communicate thoughts and feelings as much as if not more than the language we use.  

Two key concepts of social presence are intimacy and immediacy. Intimacy captures the feelings of interpersonal closeness that two people experience when interacting with one another. It is influenced by factors such as eye contact, smiling, body language, and topics of conversation of varying sensitivity. Although a digital medium through which people can see each other’s faces in real-time has a greater sense of intimacy than one without this capability, such as email or text, it still does not, as McCullough realized in her attempt to create a party event, replicate the same degree of intimacy. 

Immediacy refers to the psychological distance or feeling of mental or emotional connection a person places between themselves and the recipient. This can be conveyed both verbally and nonverbally, through physical distance or closeness, by what people are wearing (for example, formal or informal dress), and by facial expressions during a conversation. Virtual backgrounds on video calls or the humorous visual effects provided by video-conferencing platforms are one way to approximate, if not replicate, feelings of connection between team members. Interestingly, immediacy is not always dependent on being able to see one other visually.  Immediacy can change between two people speaking remotely by phone if one of the speakers’ attitude or tone suddenly changes from, for example, warm and open to harsh and critical.

Both intimacy and immediacy are governed by two additional aspects of social presence: efficiency and nonverbal communication. In this case, efficiency relates to the medium that we deem as the most effective way to get a message across to an audience. For example, it’s probably effective to leave a voicemail to simply cancel an appointment at the dentist, but to reschedule it may be more effective to speak to a person on the phone about the various times and dates available. For teams, face-to-face interactions in a shared space have the highest degree of social presence; however, in some instances, such as when there is a high degree of confrontation or interpersonal tension, another medium with less social presence—such as phone, email, or text--might be preferable and therefore more efficient. 

Nonverbal communication, meanwhile, refers to the extent that a digital medium can show the same details that in-person interactions afford. Non-verbal communication is perhaps what people most lose when interacting verbally. People can communicate with the least ambiguity and provide the most information via nonverbal communications such as body language, eye contact, posture, and physical distance. But even in shared spaces, non-verbal communication is not always a reliable communicator: people can try to control their nonverbal behavior consciously or subconsciously. We all know someone with a non-expressive “poker face” whose feelings are difficult to decipher or have had the experience of seeing someone appear positive despite hearing bad news. And the more comfortable and experienced we become at communicating via various digital mediums, the more we are able to pick up on subtle non-verbal communication such as pauses, facial expressions, or tone.    

As remote work evolves and becomes ever more prevalent, so do the digital media that we can use for virtual interactions include more social presence.  McCullough was ultimately able to stage a virtual social gathering that replicated more closely the in-person fluid mingling that she thought she’d lost by learning to use proximate chat (also called spatial audio or spatial chat) an emerging digital communication that allows users to move around and interact in a virtual space via an avatar. In this way, she was able to benefit from one of the biggest gains that virtual communication affords, and one unachievable in person: the ability to connect with people who are geographically dispersed across the globe. 

“Neeley draws on her nearly 2 decades of research to answer the critical questions regarding how we best build productive and enjoyable virtual routines into our post-COVID-19 professional lives.”

Larry Culp, CEO of GE

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