Lo-fi digital age

Back in the days where electronics were just starting to come into our lives, there was a lot of disparity in the quality of the devices, so most of the manufacturers tried to market their products by claiming that they were hifi (high-fidelity). This applied especially to playing back recorded music, starting with the turntables for the very delicate vinyl records and the scratchy sound they produced, but also to the valve-based amplifiers, which purred like a happy cat with all the electricity flowing through them, or loudspeakers, which were initially little more than a wooden box with an electromagnet, but similar labels were soon ascribed to photo and video cameras too. Of course, even top-of-the line devices were fairly crude anyway compared to our current standards.

These days many technologies widely exceed the expectations we had just a decade or two ago. Wireless connectivity is simply amazing, both in capacity and ease of use. Portable devices keep getting better in performance, storage and resolution. The cameras are getting faster, clearer and lighter, and  both on-demand and broadcast video are now so sharp that they are almost unreal. Surprisingly, the only technology that is still "lofi" (low-fidelity) is interpersonal communication.

Looking back through history, for many centuries the main means for interpersonal communication was the letter, which, depending on the era, could take days to months to get an answer (if ever). In those days it was not uncommon to poor full one-sided conversations on the paper, so that the recipient could follow along the line of thought of the sender and eventually provide feedback. Then came the telegraph, which provided very limited information content, but at least allowed same-day transmission of the message.

When the telephone was invented in the late 19th century, it provided the first real opportunity of communicating in real time across big distances. There had been ancestral equivalents based on whistles, drumbeats, etc. but they never reached the spread of the telephone. Performance has improved a lot since the early days, both in  sound quality and reliability, but the working principles establish in 1877 are still valid today. And it is remarkable that, just like then, we still experience delays, bad sound quality and sudden disconnections whenever we use Skype and similar services, even if we refer to voice-only conversations. 

Photo: James Vaughn

If you are a hard science-fiction fan as I am, you will know that video-conference has been in the wish list of technology dreamers for decades, much longer that other technologies which are now widespread, like portable devices or wireless communication, and yet, somehow, we are still stuck with grainy and jerky video whenever we do Zoom with out parents-in-law or our colleagues. Why has the technology not delivered in this particular field? Is it not necessary to have more reliable video communications with good quality?

I come to reflect on this today because, after a couple of weeks of intense preparation, the PhD group meeting today was rescheduled to take place online and, while tools like Skype or Zoom work reasonably well for meetings or informal conversations, I find that giving a presentation by these means is excruciating. It is possible that shy people, who are afraid of being in the spotlight, are fond of this way of giving talks, but for me it is tantamount to being cuffed and gagged. On the one hand, I normally use a lot of gestures when I am giving a talk, and this goes lost when the audience can only see your slides. On the other hand, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, it is very important for me to make eye contact with the audience. It is true that I will not be able to do this with every person in the audience if the venue is too big, but I can certainly connect with four, five, six people in the first rows to gouge if the message is landing well, if they are following along or if I lost them on the second slide.

In the end, the presentation went well, the professor posed a couple of well-pointed questions, and even one of the other students made an interesting remark. This is not a thrilling result, but it could certainly have gone worse and at least now I am done with it. Hopefully next time I will have a chance to impress them with my live presentation skills... Stay healthy