Is social distancing making us rude?

Is social distancing making us rude?

 

I am prompted to write this piece after having heard quite a few anguished anecdotes from close friends, and having suffered a bit personally. But the reports of these mild-mannered folks carried more weight than my own personal experience. People who know me will tell you that I am prone to eliciting incivil behaviour, irrespective of the mode of communication! But then again, maybe I am reading too much into all this, and people around the world are just as cheery online as they ever were. On the other hand, 6 months of forced social isolation cannot be without its side-effects. And then there are the problems inherent to virtual communication.

 

Of mice and men (and women)

Research in mice (apparently, they are the go to animals for these sort of studies because they are pretty social) seems to indicate that a few weeks of social deprivation causes them to become depressed, and also show antagonistic social behaviours when confronted with other mice. And these behaviours may be related to changes induced in their hypothalamic nerve cells by social isolation. Here is the link to one such study: 10.1016/j.bbr.2017.03.036 (not recommended if you are averse to descriptions of socially deprived mice being dunked into tubs of water to see how willing they are to swim! To my surprise, I was!). You may object to my comparing your behavioural proclivities to those of rodents, but regretfully, I have to tell you that we aren’t that different from them. Similar results have been observed when humans are deprived of social contact. Forced isolation for humans is distressing, and can lead to depression and aggressive behaviour. But there is one major difference between these experimental situations and the one that COVID-19 has landed us in. The mice were obviously not Zooming or Skyping from their isolation cages. Unless of course you are thinking of the hyper-intelligent, trans-dimensional beings that Douglas Adams was referring to! (If this didn’t make sense, you should most definitely go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy) That brings up the question of whether online communication is sufficient to mitigate the adverse behavioural consequences of physical isolation. Studies have shown that physical interactions resulted in positive impressions and agreement between people more often than virtual interactions. But in any case it is probably reasonable to assume that virtual communication will prevent us from turning into raving lunatics during this period of physical isolation.

 

Social distance on the internet

Video calling allows for synchronous communication almost similar to face-to-face physical interactions when 2-3 people are involved. But when there are more people, apart from the breakdown in synchrony, several other things happen, that can potentially promote the descent into incivility. The most important is of course that body language and other non-verbal cues go out of the window. Even the ability to register facial expressions, that little nod or shake of the head, becomes contingent on the size and resolution of your screen, your internet speed, and the view you are in. Good luck with tracking facial expressions in gallery view! And then there are always those worthies who keep their cameras off even on a video call. You are then left guessing as to the origins of that positive sounding “hmm”, or that combative growl. I was never a fan of those mythological heroes who fought multi-headed monsters, but after the initial few video calls in gallery view, I am beginning to see their achievements in a new light. Incidentally, if only they were around, they could make millions in consultancy fees! So, getting back to the point, it can all be very overwhelming for mere mortals, and the slip into incivility is often just a matter of time.

 

Short of beaming real-time holographic images of each other, a la Star Wars, there is currently no way to replicate the full experience of face-to-face physical interactions. Till our brain finds a way to amicably deal with this challenge, we should repose our faith in high-speed internet and large, high-resolution screens. And please, avoid gallery view!