This is commonly cited, but I wonder if anybody has studied how much communication happens by voice and screenshare, and whether there's a net loss compared to face-to-face.
I get all my work communication done through voice and shared files. Am I missing information that would otherwise be encoded in implicit facial expressions? Or in the absence of faces, is that being conveyed to me anyway, through voice and explicit verbal means?
There are many studies that look at communication comprehension and retention for where you can see the speaker's face vs. where you cannot.
The results are unsurprising. Being able to see the speaker's face improves comprehension. People rely so heavily on visual information to decode speech that there's a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect; if you set up an experimental rig so the brain receives visual information suggesting one sound but auditory information suggesting another, the visual information often takes priority over what was heard in decoding the speech.
(As someone hearing impaired, this is, pardon the pun, blindingly obvious to me. Sometimes, whether I can understand the words of a talking head on TV depends entirely on whether I look at them or not. But hearing people rely on lipreading too. From what I've read, usually far more than they're aware.)
I’ve never seen a good study. I’m sure you’ve seen that the old “70% of communication is nonverbal” canard is based on a game of telephone through a few articles and studies. But surely you’ve seen a person’s face communicate something different than what their voice is telling you? The more often you see someone’s face, the more you can pick up, too.
I get all my work communication done through voice and shared files. Am I missing information that would otherwise be encoded in implicit facial expressions? Or in the absence of faces, is that being conveyed to me anyway, through voice and explicit verbal means?