What are you missing most as we look ahead to a third month of social distancing and staying at home? I miss the chit-chat of everyday interaction most, especially the unplanned.
I miss bumping into people. That phrase suddenly sounds so wrong! Friends chatting on a sidewalk, cut short because one has to hurry to whatever it was they had planned before the unplanned happened. I even miss the hurrying.
It turns out that discussion is very difficult to digitize. The best model of discussion anywhere happens most weekday mornings at 1 First Street NE, when six men and three women sit in a row and pepper their guests for an hour on some matter they’ve all studied up on.
The United States Supreme Court is holding those sessions this week and next by phone. You can listen in. It’s fascinating and you should make time to do it, but it’s absolutely nothing like being in the room with them. The phone version is scripted. Each justice takes a turn — even Justice Thomas, who normally speaks only once every decade.
Our own paradigm of participatory polemicism, the City Club of Eugene, has been trying to keep community conversations going. They have a YouTube channel that’s worth watching, but that’s all you can do — watch. If the audience murmurs, but no one can hear it, does it make a sound?
A friend and his colleagues are contemplating their annual professional conference without asking people to fly. “It could be much better,” he told me on a Zoom call. “The conference can be quite a bit more inclusive if it’s all done remotely. It certainly will be less expensive for everyone.”
Yes, it will be less expensive, without a conference center, flights and hotel rooms. But will it be as valuable an experience? Conferences are where you meet a friend of a friend, who can help you later in ways you haven’t imagined today. You can stop an attendee who asked a good question, or who went to your alma mater, or whose accent sounds familiar.
How can we replicate such happenstance in the virtual realm? Where does the unplanned happen? How do we engineer surprises? Where will people find the answers to questions they hadn’t thought to ask? Life may not require that, but progress does. If we’re going to make this online version of life work, we’ll have to figure that part out.
No one has more at stake in this than our universities. They’re designed to be hotbeds of happenstance. In a market-driven world, this is what they sell.
Professors and students can teach and attend classes remotely, but what about all the rest? Without a pick-up game of volleyball, what will distract a student heading to the library? What foods will never be tried with no one in the lunch line to impress? Where can students bump into one another if no one is in a hurry?
How do we plan for the unplanned, support serendipity, and create coincidences? Until we tackle those tasks, we haven’t begun to replace what only our presence can provide.
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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.
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