Wireless is nothing without The Face

Do a Google search for ‘Productivity benefits of videoconferencing’, and you’ll find precisely three entries. So if the Voice over IP community has been slow to explain the productivity benefits of VoIP, it has been slower still to foresee the coming revolution in PC-based videoconferencing. Yet Manchester Business School has recently found that, among 36 UK and Irish firms planning the implementation of new technology, no fewer than 24 said they had videoconferencing in mind. The main benefit of videoconferencing for current users was that it saved costs and time, particularly in global applications. (1)

What, though, are the wider business benefits of videoconferencing?

Ever since Gerard Nierenberg and Henry Calero’s How to Read a Person Like a Book (1971) and  Desmond Morris’s Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior (1977), the study of body language has become a subject of great academic and popular interest. Yet what is not so well known is how Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) revealed that the same facial expressions were common to human beings all over the world. In a riposte to the racists of his day, Darwin affirmed humanity’s common descent and what he called ‘the unity of mankind’. (2) It is this universalism about human facial expression that explains some of the Manchester result about the specially global benefits of videoconferencing.

The Japanese or the Chinese are all supposed to look the same, be inscrutable, and hate to lose face. But in today’s new phase of globalisation, where more and more of the production of the planet’s wealth will involve Asia, even a Londoner can recognise, on a screen, when someone from the Far East is angry, joyful, surprised, afraid, distressed or disgusted.

Psychologists now hold these six emotional states to be the basic building blocks of a repertoire of up to 30 complex emotions, including irritation, exasperation, pride, gratitude – and love, of course. (3) But the productivity of the human face, both to its owner and those watching it, goes further than its expression of emotions. Working with the voice, a face can also help express the logic of an argument, as well as expressing how that argument is being received at the hands of another speaker.

We purse our lips when we concentrate on doing something, like mending a cable. We open our mouth when listening and watching intently. From infanthood onward, the symmetry, asymmetry and animation of the face are powerful sources of communication. When the face comes to IT, it will finally confirm an old adage – that most interpersonal communication is actually conducted at a visual, not an aural level.

On-screen faces will not just be a fun ‘nice-to-have’. They will dramatically improve the quality of comprehension in business – and especially in global business, where different native tongues remain an impediment to clear and clearly understood global English.

It would be foolish to underestimate the power of the voice, and the advent of CD-quality voice calls to mobile phones is certainly a step forward. But in voice-only teleconferencing, distinguishing among, say, eight participants is tough. Moreover, speech itself will be enormously assisted by the introduction of brows, eyebrows, twinkles, flared nostrils and all that.

People play movies on their faces, so faces on screens will be central to the future of business – whether we like being looked at or not.

Why then will mobile communications be nothing without video? Of course it will not be literally nothing: it’s already something. But The Face as Sine Qua Non for Mobile is not just a preference born of my predilection for the long term – for technological developments, say, five to 10 years out.

The point is simple. Business users of mobile use it to provide themselves with agility. (4) They want to be able to make immediate, spontaneous responses in urgent circumstances. Unlike Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, they worry about the management of corporate reputation. They anticipate being in the midst of great events.

The corporation that takes mobile working seriously will be the one to take the face seriously. And when MoIP is used with laptop or tablet or 3G handset or HSDPA handset, or with hands-free Bluetooth headsets, instant messaging, presence, and various kinds of recognition (handwriting on pads, voice), then the freedom to wheel and deal will be enormous – whatever the location.

That is what the advanced, global businesses of today and tomorrow want. To meet that demand will be truly disruptive – and not just in Clayton Christensen’s (rarely understood) sense of disruptive to markets. (5) The IT firm that can make the face a part of everyday business communications will disrupt the trajectory of human progress… and for the better.

Already Apple Computer has thrown down the gauntlet with a system to be launched by the summer. Apple’s Tiger iChat AV, which is based on advanced video compression technology called H.264 (also known as Advanced Video Coding or MPEG-4 Part 10), tiles your own and three other faces around the screen and can put them round a digital representation of a highly waxed conference-room table, complete with computer-generated reflections of participants on its surface.

Of course, Apple isn’t everything. But without the face, mobile will be the black-and-white TV of the noughties.

References and Footnotes

1. MBS, Productive communications study management report, March 2004, Figure 14, on http://www.slideshare.net/Terry34/productive-communication-study-management-report

2. 2014 NOTE: For a recent discussion of this point, see Paul Ekman, ‘Darwin’s claim of universals in facial expression not challenged’, Paul Ekman Group, March 2014, on
http://www.paulekman.com/uncategorized/darwins-claim-universals-facial-expression-challenged/

3. See Robert Winston, Ed, Human, Dorling Kindersley, 2004, p166.

4. For a discussion on agility, see James Woudhuysen, The globalisation of UK manufacturing and services, 2004-24: toward the agile economy, UK Trade & Investment, 2004, on http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130221222028/http://www.invest.uktradeinvest.gov.uk/Uploads/Publications/pdfs/Woudhuysen%20’Agile%20Economy’%20paper.pdf

5. Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, The innovator’s solution: creating and sustaining successful growth, Harvard Business School Press, 2003; Clayton Christensen, The innovators’ dilemma, Harvard Business School Press, 1997.