To make online communication work well we need to see its potential. This includes online mediation and online training. Both are about more than just being able to connect people technically from distant physical locations. We need the relationship work that so much of our communication requires to also be successful online. It is certainly a basic human need to be with other people in a physical space, and I am not championing a world where this is not possible, nor am I trying to whitewash over the challenges many people have experienced with online formats. Another new term is “Zoom fatigue,” and indeed being online so much can be exhausting. But have we forgotten how exhausting it was to commute and spend days in long series of meetings in offices?
We should be making the very best we can of the online formats, and perhaps that will be more difficult if the language we use for these online formats frequently contains assumptions about them that devalue them. It is all very well to be critical of existing terms, but then what alternative terms might there be?
