Virtual experiences vs real life: Rory Cellan-Jones shares his views more than two years on from our first Covid lockdown.
Over the past couple of years I’ve spent much of my time in the metaverse. OK, not quite in the fully realised virtual world which so excites Mark Zuckerberg that he changed his company’s name to Meta, but I have swapped many real-world activities for their online equivalents.
My pilates class once involved cycling to a chilly studio first thing on a Saturday; now I click on a link and join half a dozen others stretching and bending in sync with our on-screen teacher. As a fanatical sourdough baker, I travelled occasionally to a central London cookery school for tuition from a maestro.
Since I discovered a Zoom baking class, I’ve been able to hone my technique in my own kitchen. And going to work, which once meant putting on a suit and spending hours chatting and arguing face to face with colleagues, contacts and bosses, now involves popping up to the attic unshaven in trackies and a sweatshirt to join them via webcam.
The past two years have given us a crash course in what’s possible with digital communications technology – and what’s best done face to face. I may be happy enough with my Zoom pilates, but my wife couldn’t wait to get back to the dance studio for her ballet class.
Dancing around the kitchen to a YouTube video was no substitute for the rigorous instruction from her veteran teacher. But it’s at work where the debate becomes really contentious. In her book The Nowhere Office, Julia Hobsbawm argues that we’re never going back to the bad old days of presenteeism, now that we’ve learned the technology allows us to work from anywhere.
Information overload
There are still questions about what remote working does for our productivity and wellbeing. So-called ‘productivity tools’ such as Slack and Microsoft Teams enjoyed soaring growth as we tried to organise ourselves away from the office.
But too often they just amplified the information overload we’d been seeing in the workplace, or became as full of pointless gossip as any social media platform.
When it comes to existing workplace relationships, screen meetings can be pretty good – I saw some colleagues more on Zoom than I had in the office. But that makes it even harder to integrate new people into a team when there’s no opportunity for the casual one-on one chats that build a relationship.
And while it’s easy to get sentimental about the value of watercooler conversations, on my first couple of trips out to meet companies post-lockdown I learned far more than I had in dozens of on-screen encounters.
No match for reality
But wait – won’t this all change when the metaverse becomes a reality? Then we’ll put on a headset and be transported to a dance studio where the teacher’s avatar will take us through our steps,
accompanied by an out-of-tune piano.
We’ll meet colleagues by the virtual watercooler or, more likely, at a lovingly recreated version of the local pub, complete with sticky floor and truculent barman.
I’m not convinced. At the height of lockdown, one colleague, an early adopter of VR technology, told me he’d been meeting another senior journalist each morning for a quick game of virtual golf.
A few months on, I decided I needed to buy my own headset to embrace this new world. But when I rang for advice, my workmate told me the games had stopped. The two had realised that as well as being a bit of a throwback – blokes doing business on the golf course – these encounters were neither productive nor much fun.
His headset now sits unused in its box, and I’ve decided to postpone my move into the metaverse. My mission instead is to try to leave my attic at least twice a week and head out into the real world.
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