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Popular culture has been flirting with videotelephony as a sign of hyper-advanced societies since it was featured in Fritz Lang’s silent, sci-fi film Metropolis in 1927, because it’s way more exciting to imagine getting an update about alien planets/spy missions/imminent nuclear reactor meltdowns from a face on a screen than it is to hear about it over a tiny phone speaker.
Now, with most companies across the country undergoing a full-throttle conversion to video conferencing services such as Zoom, Slack, and Google Hangouts, we’ve finally reached the awe-inspiring future our movies and books have predicted.
Or, oh wait. We’re using it for meetings. We have the technology from The Jetsons, and we’re using it for sales meetings.
The first thing you should know about videoconferencing is that if you’re not using it now, you soon will be. A 2018 poll from Polycom (which, it’s worth noting, is a company that makes videoconferencing hardware) found that 74% of IT workers say video conference calls have increased over the past two years.
