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> Eye contact is extremely important for meaningful communication Some of us, specifically blind people, have lived our lives without ever being able to make e

> Eye contact is extremely important for meaningful communication Some of us, specifically blind people, have lived our lives without ever being able to make eye contact, yet we still have meaningful communication, both with each other and with sighted people. I, for one, don't ever think about my inability to make eye contact, except when a sighted person brings it up (edit: and to be clear, that only happens in a discussion like this one, not when trying to communicate with me personally).

diN0bot 7y ago
i suspect eye contact is like most things in our complicated world, which is to say it exists among multitudes of culture, accessibility and familiarity: if you grew up sighted and in a culture in which eye contact was meaningful, you will likely think eye contact is a meaningful part of communication, even if the person you are speaking with has a completely different take. that's just how things work. the same way folks without smell don't have any particular need for it, while for others smell creates intense emotional connection. just because something is not important to you doesn't mean it is not important to others, and vice versa. is the article taking a fairly narrow view of communication? sure. it's video conferencing - the whole point is that people are looking at each other... but not quite. it's an uncanny valley! (a metaphor which probably works in multiple if not all senses) i wonder how/if parallax eye contact impacts people using sign language?!
darklajid 7y ago
I'm genuinely curious: Do you use video chat a lot? If you do, is that a personal preference or something of a standard workflow at your job / you agreeing to someone else's preferences? My sample size of blind people I know and feel close enough with to discuss limitations/day to day issues is tiny unfortunately, so the question of whether video chats are a thing never came up (We did watch(?) movies before though). The reason I'm asking is that I do agree with the article, but I'd phrase it slightly different: The technology right now makes video chats ~different~ and awkward due to the lack of eye contact, IFF you're used to eye contact in face to face conversations in the first place, because video chats are supposed to allow f2f over remote distances.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  Thanks for asking. No, I don't use video chat much at all. Really, I only do it occasionally with my family when I can't be there for somebody's birthday (I'm in Washington state but the rest of my family are in Kansas). And of course, I only use video for their benefit, not mine. I currently work in an on-site office environment, and only a small number of us are blind or low-vision. When I'm initiating a real-time conversation with someone, I'll often do it by IM. We may do it face-to-face if the other person is right there, but to me that's just like an audio call with 3D positioning, perfect fidelity, and no latency. To be fair, that is indeed still better than current VoIP, but not enough so that I would insist on being in the same building as my coworkers. Indeed, with an online audio group chat, I always know when someone joins or leaves the group; that's not always the case in person. At my previous job, by contrast, we were an all-distributed team made up almost entirely of blind or low-vision people. As you would expect, we never used video. But we did use audio a lot, both one-on-one and group chats. (Our favorite voice chat system ended up being TeamTalk [1].) I never met most of my coworkers in person, and I never felt that this was a problem. It only just now occurred to me that the few sighted people on our team might have been uncomfortable with the way the rest of us worked. As for the rest of us, as far as I know, none of us ever wanted to be together in an office building. At least not for the sake of communication; having a shared pool of test hardware would have been nice from time to time. [1]: http://bearware.dk/ http://bearware.dk/
eveningcoffee 7y ago
While an interesting perspective, I think it does not reduce the importance of the eye contact for capable people. When people capable for eye contact talk to each other and are not having eye contact then it creates an impression of not being there, or not valuing the conversation enough, or not wanting (or not being capable) to tell the truth. Current video conferencing system creates an environment where participants do not necessarily feel comfortably. It is not equal to the real life conversation. You can mitigate this by looking to the camera when you are talking and then to the screen when you are listening. This creates an impression that you are looking into the eyes of the listeners but then you can not truthfully see their reactions.

diN0bot 7y ago

i suspect eye contact is like most things in our complicated world, which is to say it exists among multitudes of culture, accessibility and familiarity: if you grew up sighted and in a culture in which eye contact was meaningful, you will likely think eye contact is a meaningful part of communication, even if the person you are speaking with has a completely different take. that's just how things work. the same way folks without smell don't have any particular need for it, while for others smell creates intense emotional connection. just because something is not important to you doesn't mean it is not important to others, and vice versa. is the article taking a fairly narrow view of communication? sure. it's video conferencing - the whole point is that people are looking at each other... but not quite. it's an uncanny valley! (a metaphor which probably works in multiple if not all senses) i wonder how/if parallax eye contact impacts people using sign language?!

darklajid 7y ago

I'm genuinely curious: Do you use video chat a lot? If you do, is that a personal preference or something of a standard workflow at your job / you agreeing to someone else's preferences? My sample size of blind people I know and feel close enough with to discuss limitations/day to day issues is tiny unfortunately, so the question of whether video chats are a thing never came up (We did watch(?) movies before though). The reason I'm asking is that I do agree with the article, but I'd phrase it slightly different: The technology right now makes video chats ~different~ and awkward due to the lack of eye contact, IFF you're used to eye contact in face to face conversations in the first place, because video chats are supposed to allow f2f over remote distances.

mwcampbell 7y ago
Thanks for asking. No, I don't use video chat much at all. Really, I only do it occasionally with my family when I can't be there for somebody's birthday (I'm in Washington state but the rest of my family are in Kansas). And of course, I only use video for their benefit, not mine. I currently work in an on-site office environment, and only a small number of us are blind or low-vision. When I'm initiating a real-time conversation with someone, I'll often do it by IM. We may do it face-to-face if the other person is right there, but to me that's just like an audio call with 3D positioning, perfect fidelity, and no latency. To be fair, that is indeed still better than current VoIP, but not enough so that I would insist on being in the same building as my coworkers. Indeed, with an online audio group chat, I always know when someone joins or leaves the group; that's not always the case in person. At my previous job, by contrast, we were an all-distributed team made up almost entirely of blind or low-vision people. As you would expect, we never used video. But we did use audio a lot, both one-on-one and group chats. (Our favorite voice chat system ended up being TeamTalk [1].) I never met most of my coworkers in person, and I never felt that this was a problem. It only just now occurred to me that the few sighted people on our team might have been uncomfortable with the way the rest of us worked. As for the rest of us, as far as I know, none of us ever wanted to be together in an office building. At least not for the sake of communication; having a shared pool of test hardware would have been nice from time to time. [1]: http://bearware.dk/ http://bearware.dk/

eveningcoffee 7y ago

While an interesting perspective, I think it does not reduce the importance of the eye contact for capable people. When people capable for eye contact talk to each other and are not having eye contact then it creates an impression of not being there, or not valuing the conversation enough, or not wanting (or not being capable) to tell the truth. Current video conferencing system creates an environment where participants do not necessarily feel comfortably. It is not equal to the real life conversation. You can mitigate this by looking to the camera when you are talking and then to the screen when you are listening. This creates an impression that you are looking into the eyes of the listeners but then you can not truthfully see their reactions.