Looking Forward: Tech Changes (pt. 2)

 

"You've had too much of the digital love
You want everything live, you want things you can touch
Make it feel like a movie you saw in your youth
Make it feel like that song that just unopened you"
 - Dreamland, by Glass Animals

Continuing with the theme of advancements in technology, one could argue that the year 2020 is both nothing like anyone would have predicted, and also, very much so. 

When any good sci-fi story looks into the future, we have people instantly communicating with each other via screens from anywhere in the world, often with little need for in-person interaction. In this way, 2020 has blasted us into this reality out of sheer necessity. 

"I'm attending a virtual baby shower," I told my boyfriend the other day. He didn't blink an eye in surprise, yet it suddenly struck me that before March of this year, that sentence would have sounded wildly insane. What do you mean you're going to mail in a gift and then sit in front of a computer along with a variety of other guests, all appearing as little Brady Bunch-style blocks on the screen, playing a game before watching the mom-to-be open gifts? 

Yet here we are, figuring out ways to continue onwards, because people won't stop having babies or birthdays or wanting to interact; we just have to find alternate ways to do so. 

As soon as the shelter in place order hit my part of the country, a large task which I took on while working from home was getting licenses to virtual meeting platforms. Conference calls were used in the interim, but with everyone being home, people quickly started to miss seeing their coworker's faces. Expressions can be a large part of conversations; on a daily basis, simply having a disembodied voice wasn't cutting it. In a moment, I was scrambling to request and assign licenses to allow people to do group video calls. 

Just seeing someone through a screen brought back some sense of connection and normality. I've become accustomed to taking minutes during virtual meetings; I mute my sound so people don't hear the click-clack of my fingers on the keys, eyes darting between checking who is speaking and what I'm typing. People who were previously not very tech-savvy had to catch up quickly. Back in March, we were sure the pandemic wouldn't stretch for weeks. Certainly not months. Not up until the of September, when my agency's annual conference was planned, right? By June we were making a hard pivot to turn the conference virtual. Speakers were filmed in advance, or instructed on how to present a live webinar. Attendees practiced signing onto the virtual platform and using the chat function to ask questions. Although there were a few snafus here and there, overall we pulled it off: an entirely virtual three-day conference, complete with keynote speakers, awards, an online game for community building, and swag mailed to everyone's homes. Some people missed the in-person interaction, while more introverted attendees admitted that they absolutely loved it. 

In the movie "Wall-e", humans lounge on hover-chairs in their spaceship and interact via screens in front of their faces. Everything is so efficiently run by machines that they don't have to lift a finger, and have become used to having every interaction happen digitally. This vision of the future, albeit comically done in the film, is closer to the truth of 2020 than we'd have thought in the recent past. Weddings have been streamed live over Facebook. I've attended virtual birthday parties and happy hours. Soon, I'll be attending a virtual poetry ceremony with winners from all over the globe, something which wouldn't have been possible years before, and which may not even have been conceived of before this year. If you have a screen you can be present from anywhere. Technology is being used like never before. So although no one would have thought 2020 would be like this, in other ways, we did. 

Although I'm happy to not be confined to a hover-chair on a spaceship, I'll confess that I am still hoping for a flying car.  Also waiting for holograms to become a standard communications piece, as classic sci-fi has led us to expect. First, though, I'm hoping for a world in which virtual interactions are a convenient choice rather than a necessity. Getting back to life without the concerns which pushed us into this even-more digital frontier would be appreciated. I don't doubt that the future will be a mix of the digital world we've had to become used to and the in-person practices which we've missed. Until then, 2020 continues to be surprising ... partly as sci-fi predicted.