Where’s Tony?

So come on Steve, last month you promised Tony Blair! Yes, I know I did – and I should have held my tongue until the whole show was over. I confess: not a single sound bite or memorable concept emerged from our former leader’s lips in over an hour of speaking.

Even worse, a news agency had obviously put the online conference together, using some custom videoconferencing software to present their star commentator. This was fine, until it came time for questions. Then the format of the software started working against the journalists: we typed questions into a little text box about as big as the display on my last soap-bar Nokia phone from the 90s, to be raked over by the production team and then presented to the great man if they were found worthy. Most of them actually were because the audience was pretty much an assembly of o A-list names in journalism: I liked Rory Ro Cellan-Jones’ question because it was w all about 5G as a regulatory space and, a therefore, at least close to a subject sub Mr Blair could address.

My question wasn’t was like that, and wasn’t crafted to appeal app to the kind of PR guys and news agency ag techies who supervise a delivery platform p such as this. Normally, I actually do d okay in Q&A sessions with the hig higher-end person because things thin such as tone of voice and a sense of timing give you a big advantage over typing 200 characters into a crappy text box on a web page. The long and short of it was that my question wasn’t answered. So what did Tony have to say? The main takeaway is that, if working from home and videoconferencing are going to be the rule for the foreseeable future, make sure you exercise your right to disagree and complain. Videoconferencing has always been a rather curious medium, heavy on formality and opportunities for embarrassment: people get extra stiff and extra wary in front of a lens or a microphone. A lot of the mutual respect and interest that’s plain in a crowded meeting room ceases to be apparent once the room is entirely virtual. Even when it’s Tony Blair.

In making use of this technology as a substitute for a meeting room, a pub or a railway carriage, we need to understand the psychological l impact that carefully constructed asymmetries y etries in conferencing software imposes oses on you. In the end, I confess, I took ook a leaf out of Mr Pountain’s book ( see issue sue 312, p8): p8 like him, I have a cute Altec Lansing nsing USB speaker. It’s dumb but well ll made, clear but not loud – and it has no inbuilt uilt microphone. Suddenly that fireside chat acoustic that comes from wearing g a headset dset retreats into a distant neighbour listening tening to Radio 4 – squawks from rom a little box. The psychology sychology of conference ference calls cuts both h ways.