Imagine discussing a project you are doing with a small group: a web site, a drawing, a contraption you are building; whatever. You would not expect the people to be looking at your face the whole time. Much of the time you will all be gazing around at different parts of the project. You may be pointing your fingers around, using terms like “this”, “that”, “here” and “there”.
When people have their focus on something separate from their own bodies, that thing becomes an extension of their bodies. Bodymind is not bound by skin. And collaborating, communicating bodyminds meld on an object of common interest.
TeleKinesics
The internet is dispersing our workspaces globally, and the same is happening to our bodies.
The anthropologist, Ray Birdwhistell coined the term “kinesics“, referring to the interpretation, science, or study of body language.
I invented a word: “telekinesics”. I define it as, “the science of body language as conducted over remote distances via some medium, including the internet” (ref)
My primary interest is the creation of body langage using remote manifestations of ourselves, such as with avatars and other visual-interactive forms. I don’t consider video conferencing as a form of virtual body language, because it is essentially a re-creation of one’s literal appearances and sounds. It is an extension of telephony.
But it is virtual in one sense: it is remote from your real body.
Video conferencing, and applications like Skype are extremely useful. I use Skype all the time to chat with friends or colleagues. Seeing my collaborator’s face helps tremendously to fill-in the missing nonverbal signals in telephony. But if the subject of conversation is a project we are working on, then “face-time”, is not helpful. We need to enter into, and embody, the space of our collaboration.
Screen Sharing
This is why screen sharing is so useful. Screen sharing happens when you flip a switch on your Skype (or whatever) application that changes the output signal from your camera to your computer screen. Your mouse cursor becomes a tiny Vanna White – annotating, referencing, directing people’s gazes.
Michael Braun, in the blog post: Screen Sharing for Face Time, says that seeing your chat partner is not always helpful, while screen sharing “has been shown to increase productivity. When remote participants had access to a shared workspace (for example, seeing the same spreadsheet or computer program), then their productivity improved. This is not especially surprising to anyone who has tried to give someone computer help over the phone. Not being able to see that person’s screen can be maddening, because the person needing help has to describe everything and the person giving help has to reconstruct the problem in her mind.”
Many software applications include cute features like collaborative drawing spaces, intended for co-collaborators to co-create, co-communicate, and to to co-mess up each other’s co-work. The interaction design (from what I’ve seen) is generally awkward. But more to the point: we don’t yet have a good sense of how people can and should interact in such collaborative virtual spaces. The technology is still frothing like tadpole eggs.
Some proponents of gestural theory believe that one reason speech emerged out of gestural communication was because it freed up the “talking hands” so that they could do physical work – so our mouths started to do the talking. Result: we can put our hands to work, look at our work, and talk about it, all at the same time.
Screen sharing may be a natural evolutionary trend – a continuing thread to this ancient activity – as manifested in the virtual world of internet communications.
Virtual Body Language 