Etiquette Meets Physics: Dealing with Lag
There’s annoying lag in almost all our electronic voice communications now. Here’s why… and what to do about it.
One of the very weird differences today between talking with somebody face-to-face, and talking to somebody over a phone, is that there can be a perceptible lag between when the words come out of your mouth, and when the other person hears them.
This lag changes how we perceive each other, and learning how to deal with it is a wholly new, 21st-century skill. But before we dive into the etiquette of it, allow me a diversion into physics and networking, which explains why we’re facing this sad situation.
Light-speed
Phones used to be circuit switched. The wires between the phones of two people talking were electrically connected through a series of switches. Any lag, such as it was, was due to the speed of electricity traveling over wire, which is almost as fast as the speed of light — which, as everyone knows, is very fast indeed. It takes about 0.015 seconds for an electrical signal to travel down a wire over the roughly 3,000 miles between New York and Los Angeles. (Actual sound itself is much, much slower: In 0.015 seconds, a sound wave travels only about 16 feet through air.)
In ye olde days of corded, landline telephones, you could have fairly natural, lag-free conversations with someone, as long as your phones were connected by circuit-switched wires, which was true for most “local” calls. If you were having a “long-distance” conversation with somebody and the signal had to bounce off a satellite, things did get odd, since communications satellites are in geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles above the earth, and the round-trip time for a signal is roughly a quarter of a second.
Today, it seems as if all our calls sound like satellite calls. The annoying lag is almost always there. It has nothing to do with actual satellites, though. It’s because our communications have become nearly completely digital, and they are now packet switched. When we speak into a mobile phone, the sounds we make are converted into digital signals, by circuitry that takes time to make the conversion, then those signals are forwarded from our phone to communication infrastructure devices, like cell towers, as trains of tiny slices of our voices. These digital slices, or packets, get forwarded from one piece of network equipment to another until they reach the receiving phone. Some packets can even go by different routes, and arrive at their destinations out of order. The networking technology sorts them all out. Then, in the receiving phone, the packets are de-converted from digital signals back into the analog waveforms necessary to vibrate the phone’s speaker, which moves the air, which human ears register as sound.
Each of the tiny digital transactions takes time to perform on each packet. Each packet is also sharing electronic resources with, possibly, thousands of other calls or data streams on the same wire or wireless frequency, jockeying for position. While every tiny operation happens magically fast, there’s still a lot that has to happen. It adds up to perceptible lag in conversations, even if the actual distance between the two devices is quite short.
Modern communications equipment keeps getting better, pushing the lag down. But then we keep making things harder for the machines by making communications richer. For example, by making our phone calls into high-quality audio, or by adding video, or making the video high-definition. Then we mathematically encrypt everything so it’s private. And then we ask pocket-sized machines with weak radios and limited battery power to do most of the work.
In sum, it’s a miracle you can Facetime anyone at all.
Physics class is over
It all miraculously works, even though there’s this lag. You say something on your end, and it takes time for the other person to hear it, and then they respond, and it takes time for you to hear that. The little cues that we’re used to from face-to-face talking, that say, “I hear you,” or “I care,” come at the wrong times. It leads to one person thinking the other isn’t paying attention, or doesn’t care, or is angry.
When we expect electronic voice or video calls to be just like face-to-face conversations — or even like phone calls from 30 years ago — we end up stepping on each other’s words. It sucks.
The trick is to not treat a phone call the way we used to, and to definitely not treat a video call as if you’re in the same room with someone. While modern communication may initially fool us into behaving just like we are talking to someone who’s in the room with us, that isn’t how it works. It’s more like having a walkie-talkie conversation, where only one person can talk at once. Walkie-talkie conversations can work just fine, as long as both people follow the rules.
The basic rules are simple, even if they can be hard to follow. Primarily, we have to stop interrupting each other. Even little micro-interruptions — “uh huhs” and the like — end up arriving at the wrong time, and they send the wrong message.
That also means that when we’re talking, we have to be clear when we are done. You can’t appear to stop talking, wait a quarter of a second, and then go on, not if you don’t want to be interrupted. The art of holding the floor in a video conversation is different from doing so face-to-face.
These skills are especially difficult to hone in personal calls, where our instinct is to communicate emotionally as if we are physically there with our conversation partner. Lag changes the dynamic in a big way.
The new high-fidelity audio we sometimes get in our phone calls, and the emotional impact that video communicates, can substitute for contemporaneity to an extent. It helps, but it’s different. We should not expect to get the same quality of emotional feedback on a mobile phone call as we might be used to if we grew up with corded handsets.
Modern etiquette means adjusting how we behave on our calls. And it means adjusting our expectations for what we get out of them.