Let alone Jackie Weaver, no one has authority in a virtual world

If you haven’t seen that Handforth Parish Council meeting by now, I suggest you are having a more interesting lockdown than most. It is perhaps a sign of the times we are living through that within 24 hours of the video’s release, it had racked up millions of views; dream cast lists for the sitcom version had been published; and t-shirts printed with quotes from the meeting were selling out.

Beyond its sheer comedic value, I suggest the meeting had such virality because it resonates so powerfully with the working life we have become accustomed to. By now, we are all familiar with a virtual meeting gone awry, and Handforth’s was the perfect virtual storm.

In the video, the unflappable ‘national treasure’ Jackie Weaver tries valiantly to keep control as she’s berated for having ‘no authority’ (teams of investigative journalists have been deployed to uncover the truth of this claim); ‘Julie’s iPad’ answers the phone and neglects to mute, ‘Oh hiya. I’m just in a meeting at the moment, can I give you a call back?’; and an unhappy participant mutters, ‘F**k off,’ as the meeting opens.

(Handforth Parish Council / YouTube)

But comical as the now-viral video is, it is also an indictment of all that is wrong with life on Zoom. Communication is not a two-dimensional exercise: so much is lost when we operate from behind a screen. All implicit feedback – non-verbal sounds, body language, facial expressions – is deadened if not removed entirely, and our usual social norms are rendered defunct.

When we interact in person, mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of our brain fire both when we act and when we observe an action in another being. These were first discovered in the mid-1990s by a team of Italian neuroscientists, who noticed that a set of neurons in monkeys’ brains were activated both when the animal was given food but also when it watched another animal handling food.

Since then, mirror neurons have been ascribed huge psychological importance, influencing our language skills and social behaviours. While the exact role of mirror neurons remains to be agreed upon, they are likely to have huge bearing on our ability to feel empathy. Remove our ability to see or read another persons’ responses, the result of a pixelated camera or delayed connection, you lessen the firing of our mirror neurons, and therefore our ability to empathise with that person is far decreased. One wonders if the bullying exhibited in the Handforth video would have been so explicitly hostile in an in-person meeting.   

The idea that people act differently online than in person is not a new one. The theory of online disinhibition explores the reasons why we feel a lack of restraint in online communications compared to in-person interactions.

In his 2004 paper, The Online Disinhibition Effect, psychologist John Suller identified six factors that change people's behaviour online:

• dissociative anonymity (‘my actions can't be attributed to my person’);

• invisibility (‘nobody can tell what I look like, or judge my tone’);

• asynchronicity (‘my actions do not occur in real-time’);

• solipsistic introjection (‘I can't see these people, I have to guess at who they are and their intent’);

• dissociative imagination (‘this is not the real world, these are not real people’);

• minimising authority (‘there are no authority figures here, I can act freely’).[1]

When the above is applied to a corporate setting, invisibility is key, and it is enabled by online communications tools. In tandem, online communications is a relatively new discipline without an agreed etiquette, allowing people to take greater liberties than they might in person. Perhaps in time this etiquette will be developed, but what else will be lost if we surrender to solely virtual communications?

Corporate leaders are alive to this danger. Last week at the World Economic Forum, Barclays’ CEO Jes Staley and JP Morgan Chase’s head of asset and wealth management, Mary Erdoes, were two of the first prominent executives to speak out on the unsustainability of working from home, at least full time.

At the virtual summit Staley said: ‘It’s remarkable it’s working as well as it is, but I don’t think it’s sustainable… It will increasingly be a challenge to maintain the culture and collaboration that these large financial institutions seek to have and should have.’

Culture and collaboration are built by communication; the kind that simply isn’t facilitated by online tools. For all they have enabled over the past year, we must remember that online interactions are no substitute for human ones.

Until some level of in-person communication is restored, being aware of the pitfalls of online interaction and understanding that on a biological level you are not responding as you would normally is key to combating the dangers of life online.

For the time being, all we can do is remain self-aware, work with what we have, and look for the positives. To be fair to Zoom, it did allow Jackie Weaver to evict certain participants from the meeting room which – one imagines, but cannot be entirely certain about – she might have been more hesitant to do in person.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/online-aggression

Written by; Imogen Beecroft, Head of Client Services at Audley