by Nick Morgan
That’s bad news for many of the ways we communicate in the virtual space today. It’s one of the reasons conference calls are so difficult, for example. But VR is getting closer and closer to replicating the experience of being in the same room, Blom says. Certain things can help immensely. “If we’ve all been to the same space—for instance, corporate headquarters—when we have a virtual experience that’s in the same space, that really grounds that experience,” he says.
Researchers today are working on technologies that allow for better and better avatars in virtual environments, Blom says. Right now, an avatar can replicate broad movements like the way your arms and legs are moving and can show which direction you’re looking in. But startups are currently working on software that can create a digital version of your face from photographs or match smaller facial movements. “These kinds of things are going to happen more and more,” Blom says.
Not too long from now, he says, “we can have a virtual-face-to-
virtual-face where that face is actually us.”
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It will take a while before technology can replicate things like microexpressions, which make face-to-face communication so rich, Blom says. But in the meantime, our experiences in VR can do a lot to enrich our understanding of how we communicate.
Holograms replace travel
As we learn to embrace VR and other such advanced means of communication, we’ll get more and more comfortable with our virtual selves projected in physical space. The next frontier of not being present is being present in a virtual sense.
All the trends toward less permanent work arrangements, in terms of both employment and office space, will add momentum to this idea of the avatar as an actual replacement for our physical bodies. Both cost and convenience align here, and the trend will be hard to stop.
The office as a traditional place for groups of people to meet, sit, and do coordinated work projects will become obsolete. IBM
has reduced the office space it occupies by seventy-eight million square feet in the last two decades, saving $100 million annually.6 That’s just one company in one twenty-year period. Future generations won’t know what the word office means. They’ll still work, but not in that space.
Face-to-face conferences will still
happen for special occasions
We humans can’t rewire quickly enough to do away with face-to-face conferences for now. Indeed, we’ll have in-person conferences for the next century at least. Why? There are a few reasons. Conferences offer work teams and individuals a change of perspective. They are a good way to get out of your rut.
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Most importantly, conferences offer organizations and their employees the opportunity for powerful face-to-face encounters.
Because of the way our brains are constructed, with mirror neurons that fire with the emotions of the people around us, face-to-face meetings provide important experiences that we can’t get virtually—at least not for a long time to come.
Moreover, conferences offer people a chance to focus in an information-saturated world. It’s difficult for us humans to focus online because of the lack of emotional reward in the impoverished channels we use. At the same time, we get quick little boosts of endorphins from checking email, glancing at Facebook, checking Instagram, and so forth, because the constant updates associated with these online worlds are like little sugar rushes for us. Consequently, we’re constantly distracted and need face-to-face breaks from online distraction for deeper human meaning to be exchanged. And busy, stressed-out employees need a chance to think about the office away from the office—for as long as we still have offices.
Virtual meetings can work well where there is already a relationship established, but they are very poor ways to initiate human relationships. Certain reactions only happen between people in close proximity. As you know by now, perhaps the most important of these is trust. Online trust is fragile, shallow, and, once broken, impossible to restore.
Virtual isolation will continue to
add to our social anxiety
We’ll continue to get in touch with more and more people, but it will be the virtual version of these people, and not the real one, that we connect with all too often. These virtual connections will leave the unconscious mind unsatisfied.
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We have all this fear, thanks to the pace of change and the randomness of the future, that the future will be something awful. But logic dictates that a surprising amount of our future will be a repeat of something we’ve done in the past. We think the same thoughts, go to the same places, and argue with the same people—over and over again. A good deal of our angst, therefore, inevitably comes from replaying the recent past, wish-ing it had gone better, and wondering what we might have done differently.
Sages have long counseled us to let go of the past because we can’t change it. But I don’t think their counsel really gets at the heart of the problem. We obsess about the past because we fear replaying the same patterns tomorrow, or the next day. We look backward, negotiating with our memories, trying to make them come out differently to control the future.
But of course we can’t control the future. Instead, we need to look forward, thinking to ourselves, “What’s one small thing I can change to affect the outcome when that scenario comes around again?” Otherwise, it’s Groundhog Day for everyone, and who wants that?
If you’re clear about why you’re moving forward, whom you’re moving forward with, and how moving forward might be only slightly different—you just might pull it off. And your future then can be a wholly positive one.
It doesn’t have to be this way
Finally, what might the virtual world look like in the future if it really worked well? How might it help us have more satisfying, fulfilled lives rather than—as it does now—promoting hate, creating envy, and inducing us all to believe that somewhere, somehow, someone else is having a better time than we are?
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I see five desiderata that the online world could aspire to offer to make the world a better place for humans.
First, the online world would focus more on the future than on the past. Currently, we google random things to settle bets with our spouses about that bit of movie trivia, or to catch up on the news, or to see what we’ve missed on Facebook. The internet shows us what we already know. How could it bring us more possibilities and suggestions, rather than the present sorry state of things and the past?
In the movies, the purpose of augmented reality is to comple-ment the abilities of the wearer of some cool device. Our current internet just tells us what we already know. It intensifies our tendencies rather than pointing us in interesting new directions.
Second, the online world would become more crowdsourced and user generated. The current trend on the internet is for the huge dominant players like Facebook to become increasingly powerful and to choose what we see more and more thoroughly.
Already, my feed has become a mix of advertisements for products related to something that I just googled. Thinking about a trip to Italy? Here’s some premium luggage! This trend needs to be reversed, and we need more people sharing real wisdom with the world.
Third, the internet should help us create, weave, and tell better stories about our lives. Even Facebook does a miserable job of helping us document and make sense of our lives, focused as it is on the next photo rather than the overall story. None of us takes enough time to stop and ponder the larger arc of existence; how could the internet help us do that?
Fourth, the online world should bring together communities of differing ideas, faiths, purposes, and meanings rather than fragmenting them furth
er. We need more forums, not fewer.
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common ground, not more hate. How could the virtual world help in this way?
Fifth and finally, the virtual world should help us think longer term rather than shorter term. One of the well-documented effects of our harried virtual lives, with our mobile phones turned on 24-7, is that we have become grazers rather than real consumers of bigger ideas, slower-moving organizations, and deeper connections. How could our superficial, fast, and furious internet give us more profound, well-paced, and joyous experiences?
My journey into the online world to understand the virtual communicator has led me to understand how profoundly inhuman many ways of virtual communication are. The virtual world bleaches out human emotion, when it is emotion that fundamentally allows us to see patterns, create meanings, and form memories. The virtual world takes away one of the deep joys of human interaction—that sense of near simultaneity, when you and I are in sync, communicating effortlessly, immediately, and passionately with hardly any sense at all of the distance between us. And the virtual world substitutes clumsy, colorless, and clownish forms of communication, depriving us of the natural ways in which humans evolved over the millennia to talk to one another without distance, without division, and without despair.
Our very human job now is to learn to put the emotional and the memorable back into this attenuated world that has sprung up around us, the digital dragon’s teeth we have sown and that have brought us virtual convenience and speed—at far too high a price.
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NoTES
Introduction
1. Piercarlo Valdesolo, “Scientists Study Nomophobia—Fear of Being without a Mobile Phone,” Scientific American, February 2016.
2. Moira Burke, Cameron Marlow, and Thomas Lento, “Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [Atlanta, April 10–15, 2010], ed. Elizabeth Mynatt et al. (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2010), 1909–1912.
3. Denis Campbell, “Facebook and Twitter ‘Harm Young People’s Mental Health,’” Guardian, May 19, 2017. See also Tara Bahrampour, “Teens Who Spend Less Time in Front of Screens Are Happier—Up to a Point, New Research Shows,” Washington Post, January 22, 2018.
4. Vanessa K. Bohns, “A Face-to-Face Request Is 34 Times More Successful Than an Email,” Harvard Business Review, April 11, 2017.
5. Keld Jensen, “People Lie More Often by Email Than Face-to-Face,” Forbes, July 23, 2014.
6. Christopher Bergland, “Face-to-Face Social Contact Reduces Risk of Depression,” Psychology Today, October 5, 2015.
7. Nicholas Epley et al., “Egocentrism over Email: Can We Communicate As Well As We Think?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, no. 6 (2006): 925–936.
8. Melinda Wenner Moyer, “Eye Contact Quells Online Hostility,” Scientific American, September 1, 2012.
9. Adrian Furnham, “The Secrets of Eye Contact, Revealed,” Psychology Today, December 10, 2014; Michael Argyle and Janet Dean, “Eye Contact, Distance, and Affiliation,” Sociometry 28, no. 3 (1965): 289–304.
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10. Robin Reilly, “Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Now,” Gallup Business Journal, January 7, 2014; Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “Evolution of the Networked Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results,” McKinsey &
Company, March 2013, www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/
our-insights/evolution-of-the-networked-enterprise-mckinsey-global-survey-results.
11. Lynn Wu, “Social Network Effects on Productivity and Job Security: Evidence from the Adoption of a Social Networking Tool,” Information System Research, November 1, 2012.
12. Derek Thompson, “Study: Nobody Is Paying Attention on Your Conference Call,” Atlantic, August 21, 2014.
13. John Cloud, “Study: Doodling Helps You Pay Attention,” Time, February 26, 2009.
14. Innocent Chiluwa et al., “Texting and Relationship: Examining Discourse Strategies in Negotiating and Sustaining Relationships Using Mobile Phones,”
Covenant Journal of Language Studies 3, no. 2 (2015): 15–38.
15. Suzanne Wu, “Was It Smart to Use Your Phone at That Meeting?” USC
[University of Southern California] News, October 24, 2013.
16. Epley et al., “Egocentrism over Email.”
17. John Medina, phone interview with the author, August 21, 2017. See also John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, 2nd ed. (Seattle: Pear Press, 2014).
18. John Medina, phone interview with the author, August 21, 2017.
19. John Medina, “The Performance Envelope,” Brain Rules (blog), September 25, 2014, http://brainrules.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-performance-envelope.html.
20. Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles, ch. 4.
21. Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
22. Annamarie Mann and Jim Harter, “The Worldwide Employee Engagement Crisis,” Gallup Business Journal, January 7, 2016.
23. Alan R. Teo et al., “Does Mode of Contact with Different Types of Social Relationships Predict Depression in Older Adults? Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, October 6, 2015. See also Kim Jung-Hyun, Seo Mihye, and David Prabu, “Alleviating Depression Only to Become Problematic Mobile Phone Users: Can Face-to-Face Communication Be the Antidote?,” Computers in Human Behavior 51, part A (October 2015): 440–447.
24. Morgan, Power Cues, here and for the discussion of voice in the remainder of this chapter.
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25. A. K. Pradeep, The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 4.
26. Stanford Gregory, phone interview with the author, April 2012.
Chapter One
1. See, for example, A. D. Craig, “Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13, no. 4 (2003): 500–505.
See also Barnaby D. Dunn et al., “Listening to Your Heart: How Interoception Shapes Emotion Experience and Intuitive Decision Making,” Psychological Science 21, no. 12 (2010): 1835–1844; Jonathan W. Ho et al., “Bidirectional Modulation of Recognition Memory,” Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 39 (2015): 13,323–13,335; Lisa Kinnavane et al., “Detecting and Discriminating Novel Objects: The Impact of Perirhinal Cortex Disconnection on Hippocampal Activity Patterns,” Hippocampus 26, no. 11 (2016): 1393–1413; S. Takami, “Recent Progress in the Neurobiology of the Vomeronasal Organ,” Microscopy Research and Technique 58, no. 3
(2002): 228–250.
2. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, trans. Frances Anderson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
3. Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).
4. Tim Elmore, “Nomophobia: A Rising Trend in Students,” Psychology Today, September 18, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/
artificial-maturity/201409/nomophobia-rising-trend-in-students.
5. Piercarlo Valdesolo, “Scientists Study Nomophobia—Fear of Being without a Mobile Phone,” Scientific American, February 2016.
6. Caglar Yildirim, “Exploring the Dimensions of Nomophobia: Developing and Validating a Questionnaire Using Mixed Methods Research” (master’s thesis, Iowa State University, 2014).
7. Vicky Kung, “Ris
e of ‘Nomophobia’: More People Fear Loss of Mobile Contact,” CNN, March 7, 2012.
8. Elmore, “Nomophobia: A Rising Trend in Students.”
9. NIDA Blog Team, “Teens and ‘Nomophobia’: Cell Phone Separation Anxiety,” Drugs & Health (blog), National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens, December 9, 2015, https://teens.drugabuse.gov/blog/
post/teens-and-nomophobia-cell-phone-separation-anxiety.
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250 Notes
Chapter Two
1. Sandy Pentland, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” Harvard Business Review, April 2012.
2. Linda Carroll, “Face-to-Face Interaction Acts Like a ‘Vitamin’ for Depression, Study Suggests,” Today.com, October 5, 2015.
3. Chen Wang, Rui Zhu, and Todd C. Handy, “Experiencing Haptic Rough-ness Promotes Empathy,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 26, no. 3 (July 2016): 350–362.
4. Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Science, October 24, 2008: 606–607.
5. Denis Campbell, “Facebook and Twitter ‘Harm Young People’s Mental Health,’” Guardian, May 19, 2017.
6. Nick Morgan, Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2005).
7. Luke J. Chang et al., “A Sensitive and Specific Neural Signature for Picture-Induced Negative Affect,” PLOS Biology 13, no. 6 (2015): e1002180.
8. Nick Morgan, Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), ch. 7.
9. Ibid.
10. Ezequiel Morsella et al., “Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39 (2016): e168.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000643.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
Chapter Three
1. European Commission, “Factsheet on the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling,”
n.d., www.inforights.im/media/1186/cl_eu_commission_factsheet_right_to_