Communication ain’t what it used to be

I’m someone who grew up between communication eras. Letter-writing was going out of fashion when I was young, and landline telephone calls were still pretty expensive – particularly if the recipient happened to live more than a few miles away.

So we’d all come home from school and immediately phone our schoolchums, trying to block out the sound of Dad grumbling about the bill in the background.

This state of affairs lasted for decades. I worked as a local newspaper reporter in the 1980s and we’d type out our news stories and hand them to a courier who would actually drive them the nine miles to the printer’s. On one occasion the courier was involved in an accident en route, and my boss was more concerned about the possibility of bloodstains on the copy than at any injuries he might have received.

Then came the fax machine (clunky, noisy, and only good for spitting out screwed-up balls of thermal paper) and the Brother (ditto) followed by emails, which were erratic and easy to send by mistake. Mobile phones and video calls were the stuff of science fiction and seemed unlikely to catch on even when they were finally invented. After all, who would ever answer a video call when one was looking scruffy, having a bath or in a really untidy room?

But now that we’re all locked down we FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, HouseParty, Messenger Chat and What’s App Call with abandon. And those concerns about one’s appearance and one’s backdrop are no longer an issue, thanks to technology.

You can doctor your screen background to make it look as though you’re calling from Caribbean beach, a Disney park or even the moon. Brian conducted an entire workshop from a spaceship the other day. 

You can change your own persona as well – which is pretty handy if your home-executed haircut went awry. You can give yourself bunny ears or a cat’s head, or turn yourself into another person altogether – or even a thing. When googling this phenomenon I came across: “How to be a banana in Google Meet” - a link I’m never likely to follow. 

But video calling can still catch people out as we predicted. You can see the results on YouTube: there was the man who inadvertently joined a Zoom meeting stark naked, and the female executive whose one-to-one was sidetracked when her husband crossed the screen in the background in his underwear.

Then there was the woman who turned herself into a potato on Zoom, but couldn’t figure out how to reverse the process. So she conducted the entire meeting in her potato persona while her subordinates tried unsuccessfully to control their smirks.

I particularly liked the story of the priest who accidentally applied filters when attempting to livestream a mass. The service was conducted solemnly in Latin as usual while the good father unwittingly took on the guise of a weightlifter, a space cadet and a member of the Blues Brothers in turn.

Using this new tech obviously requires a bit of practice. Lucky we’re all getting shedloads of that right now.