YouTube recommended this one while I was watching the “Focus is a Muscle ” video. It’s from the same Amoura Productions shoot twelve years ago. The technology has moved. The story hasn’t. Shared air will always be the winner.
Here’s what I said back then.
Internet technologies make everything more efficient. But the one thing the internet doesn’t make more efficient is our ability to really get to know someone. To really trust someone.
I can learn more sitting and talking to someone face to face. Making eye contact. Watching those little micro movements in your face that give away whether you’re serious or not. Whether you’re lying or telling me the truth. Those things are impossible to see in text messages.
I told this story in one of my speeches. I was speaking at the Kentucky Association of Realtors. Pre-presentation, a guy I’d known for years online, probably five years from ActiveRain and Facebook and Twitter, walked over. I recognized him. Knew his name. Went up and hugged him. Classic. We’d never met face to face but we’d been talking online forever. It was like meeting an old friend for the first time.
We walked to the back of the room. A few minutes later, somebody I didn’t know, somebody who knew him, walked up and started talking to us.
After about ten minutes, I was totally engaged with this other person I’d never had any contact with before in my life. He was intelligent. He was engaging. I was drawn to him as a person. There was an immediate sense that I could trust him. That this was someone I would do business with.
Ten minutes. Face-to-face.
And it hit me in that moment. It had taken me five, six years to get to that level of trust with the guy I’d hugged at the door. And in ten minutes, I had almost the same feeling about a stranger.
We place too much value on what technology can do for us in terms of building meaningful relationships. I don’t discount for a second social media’s ability to connect us. I love everything that comes from it. So many of the relationships in my life started online.
But we make a mistake if we marginalize how effective getting people face-to-face is for solidifying those relationships. For building them.
We fool ourselves if we think social media will ever, ever, ever replace the efficiency of face-to-face communication. It’s never going to happen. Not even Skype. Not even video.
It’s somewhat quaint to read this now. I’m not even sure I believe 100% of it anymore. But one thing I know for sure, it’s not 2014, and we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.
I’ve spent the last year building voice clones of myself. Talking to Maya and Miles at Sesame. (Side note: They have two new voices in their iPhone app now, Charlie and Simone. ) Running conversations through Hume’s EVI platform with different language models underneath. The technology has gotten frighteningly close to passing the test.
Close. Not there.
What I was describing in that ballroom in Kentucky wasn’t really about the medium, though. It was about the body in the room. It was about the shared air. About the risk of being misread by someone who might also be misreading me. It was about vulnerability. The vulnerability of being known without the option to log off. That’s impossible to beat.
Ten minutes face-to-face, of shared air, still beats any amount of time on a screen.
What’s changed isn’t really the technology. It’s how willing we’ve become to settle for the substitute.
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