‘Sitting in a videoconference is a uniformly crap experience. Instead of corroding our humanity, let’s design tools to enhance it...
‘Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can’t express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we’re just not doing it right.
‘However, I’d like to think that this exploration of videoconferencing in contrast with other more humane experiences has provided some hope and indications of the way to go... That’s how designing works: incremental improvements based on insights drawn from experience. Let’s be optimistic, and keep designing to humanise tech, and using tech to learn about being better humans.’
Read here (Aeon, Dec 1, 2020)
