If you aren't spending most share of your time every day in lock down staring at a screen, you are definitely a sage. But if you are somebody who has become a slave to the screen, that's fine as well. For some of us, it's our office work that keeps us glued to our monitor or mobile screens, for some, it's the online classes, and for others, it's their own reasons of doing so.
So it isn't surprising to see web applications for meetings and video conferencing like Zoom, Google Meet, and many more, gaining the limelight all of a sudden since the pandemic took over our freedom to meet people in person.
But it isn't just this pandemic which has increased our urge to stay connected all the time. If you notice, the history of existence of phone calls and text messaging for conversation dates long back that most of us can't recall a day when we weren't having them in our lives.
The reason behind all of these is to reduce the distance which is there when we aren't close to somebody we want to interact with. Telephones, when they were introduced fascinated everybody as to how the physical distance can be surpassed to interact with people miles away. And the good thing was that you got instant feedback and response to your speech. But soon that good thing started to feel a little too much as we didn't always have too much to talk about and hence the conversation didn't last long. So just for the sake of staying in touch, calling somebody every day and asking how they were and then hanging up after getting the response didn't make much sense.
And that's when text messaging came into picture. They removed the necessity of instant responding, mainly because the sender couldn't know when the recipient would see their text and hence the response time varied immensely. But that way, you could stay in touch more than the telephone allowed to. If you are texting somebody too often, they would begin to expect a text from you more often, and hence the response time would be far less. But even text messaging started to feel restrictive after a while. The feelings in the words, which could be felt over a phone call were missing in the text messages. Sure the emoticons helped a bit, as people started using them to convey their emotions along with the text, but are we really feeling the exact emotions we send an emoticon of? An emoticon conveying "ROFL" doesn't mean we are literally rolling on the floor. So it started to feel we needed to get the true emotions back into picture even while interacting with people miles away.
And that's when these applications allowing for video calling came into existence. You can see the faces of each other while interacting, hence emotions part was kind of taken care of. You could see the things in each other's backgrounds, hence they provided for something to talk about in case you felt you were running out of topics to talk about. And you are staying in touch more than ever since you see each other real time.
Now in a time when pandemic has limited our human interaction, these applications together, phone calls, text messaging and video calling, all are kind of together reducing every possible constraints we had while interacting with someone virtually.
The one big constraint still obvious though is the ability to make physical contact. Shaking hands, hugging each other, and all other types of physical contacts aren't possible virtually, at least for now. In COVID-19 era though, we know physical contact isn't safe anymore. But that doesn't mean we won't find a solution in near future to facilitate normal physical contact once again when we meet with people face to face. And then this constraint of physical contact over virtual connections might start to feel bigger than they do now. And who knows, maybe in future, that part too would be taken care of.
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