Initially I thought I was witnessing an unusual practice. Individuals with whom I was speaking were simultaneously involved in other conversations. Then, when I was part of a team planning and organising an event online – a video conferenced workshop, the organisers set up a social media account for us to communicate with each other while we were on the video conference. We could then work better as a team, they believe. That is what I wonder about.

In the early 2000s, as a teacher, I was often amused when students were obviously online, such as creating back channels to chat while I was teaching. The use of backchannels is analogous to colleagues passing notes or winking at each other to communicate their reactions to the lecture or lecturer.  

I had an even older colleague than me speaking to my class. When he saw so many students typing away frantically on their laptops, he kindly said that they didn’t need to take notes as he would share his slides after the lecture. I gently said that they probably aren’t taking notes. It is more likely that they are chatting with each other, checking out a book he had mentioned, etc. Multi-tasking is very naturally enabled by new media, but that is the kind of practice that many teachers believe to be a distraction and one more reason to ban the use of the internet during class. (I don’t. If students aren’t paying attention, they will find other ways to spend their time, from daydreaming to sleeping.)

Fast forwarding a decade or two, in the early days of routine video conferencing and online courses, there would be multiple interruptions. A ringtone of a phone. A dog barking. A cat walking in front of the screen. And as everyone started to meet online routinely, meeting would be interrupted by another call scheduled before the end of the call they were involved. Back-to-back conferencing. But there are interruptions in any venue to some degree. They can be overlooked.

However, increasingly, we can expect our colleagues to be involved in multiple conversations as they are speaking with us. Don’t be surprised if colleagues are reading and answering their e-mail, listening to a podcast or music on their ear pods, chatting with others on the call through the conference chat, and  – I believe to be increasingly the case – conferencing with others at the same time, either to coordinate their moves on the other call or to participate in an entirely different meeting. Already I hear a lot of people not hearing a question. “Could you repeat that?” Not surprising.

What will being at the meeting truly mean? Should one rule of video conferencing etiquette be to remain focused on one conversation at a time, or is that impossible to monitor and difficult to establish?

Some people are multi-taskers, and they can multi-converse effortlessly. Long long ago I was invited to a well-supported conference with communication experts handling the speakers. The coms person helping me had at least two mobile phones between her fingers of each hand to handle communications across her team. Jaw dropping. But most of us need to focus on the conversation in which we are theoretically or institutionally involved. Good luck!