HAS COVID19 FAST FORWARDED HUMAN COMMUNICATION MODES?

By: Raj Natarajan

As the COVID 19 pandemic spreads around the World unabated, the usual question you ask your friend or a relative is whether he or she still has a job and if yes, is he or she working from home? Most of the people who responded to my question say they are working from home and more over they are now more efficient working from home because the travel time to work can now be more productive and also they are in their comfort zone at home. Unless the physical presence is required at the work place, like a construction site, hospital or a restaurant etc., the modern communications have enabled millions of people to work from a place, remote from the traditional office.

Let’s look at an example of one of the most sought after office space of the world, Manhattan in New York. Matthew Haag, in his article published in New York Times in May 2020, says that before the COVID 19 crisis, three of New York City’s largest commercial tenants Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley had tens of thousands of workers in towers across Manhattan. Now, as the city wrestles with when and how to reopen, executives at all three firms have decided that it is highly unlikely that all their workers will ever return to those buildings. The research firm Nielsen has arrived at a similar conclusion. Even after the crisis has passed, its 3,000 workers in the city will no longer need to be in the office full-time and can instead work from home most of the week.

Manhattan has the largest business district in the country and probably the World, and its office towers have long been a symbol of the city’s global dominance. COVID 19 pandemic has forced large corporations around the World to figure out how to function productively with workers operating from home and realized unexpectedly that it was not all bad, Matthew Haag says.

This amazing shift in the way we work, commute and communicate has been made possible due the enormous strides in communication technology over the last 150 years. Let’s take a quick look at the history of development of communication technologies in the last century and a half.

Italian innovator Antonio Meucci is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device. The fax machine has a much longer history than you might think! Invented back in 1843 by Alexander Bain, the “Electric Printing Telegraph” was the world’s first faxing device.

60 Years ago Video Conferencing was first introduced by AT&T at the World Fair in New York in 1964. It is used throughout many industries, from manufacturing, healthcare, the military, and by schools as an effective real-time communication tool.

What about the mobile phones which have become so important these days? Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. In April 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment. In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world’s first cellular network in Japan. From 1983 to 2020, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion; enough to provide one for every person on Earth.

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo! In the recent times we have seen many apps which can be downloaded on our PCs, tablets and mobile phones like “FaceTime”, “MS Teams”, “ZOOM” and “Google Meet” etc. which easily facilitate virtual meetings connecting people across the World through cyberspace.

Therefore these strides in communication technologies have made it possible working from a remote point or working from home as in most cases. In fact, the history of working from home isn’t nearly as recent as many think. It actually has a much longer past than our history of working in offices. For example, during medieval times, most working-class English people lived in work-homes. The single-story, one-room houses were “a combination of kitchen and spinning/weaving/dressmaking workshop, bedroom and dairy, dining room, butchery, tannery, and byre.” Therefore the growth of remote working in the last 10 years is ultimately a return to an early and long-used way of working.

This growth in remote working, using modern communications, would have reached the stage we are seeing today, in a decade or two, say by 2035 under normal circumstances. However due to COVID 19 pandemic that stage has been fast forwarded forcing employers to allow some categories of their employees to work remotely, mainly from home, due to isolation and social distancing restrictions.

Is everyone happy about working from home, maybe not? They are probably missing dressing up in the morning and going to a train station or bus stand, catching up with friends and having a chat during the journey to work or maybe they are missing getting together with colleagues at lunch time and talk about last night’s footy game, cricket score or new movie they saw or maybe they are missing getting together with colleagues and friends for a drink during the “happy hour” after work. All these social interactions may seem insignificant but they are essential to break the monotony of just bread and butter work. So what is the future of remote working? I think it will be a combination of the past practises of sticking to your office 9 to 5 and working from home, maybe three days in office and two days from home. What do you think?