I find that I tend to notice a lot of that backchanneling consciously, possibly because I’m somewhat socially awkward. Although I’m sure I miss lots of it too. I agree that it’s important and somewhat hard to replicate elsewhere.
I do find that it can be replicated to a reasonable extent on video calls, especially if lag is very low, but only once you’re used to talking with a particular person in that medium. The first few calls with any one person tend to be awkward, but with collaborators & coworkers that I’ve done it many times with, video calls can recapture a substantial chunk of the bandwidth (relative to eg phone calls, or certainly email/chat).
For asynchronous collaboration tools, I find that spatial-hierarchical tree structures (eg mind maps, argument maps) create a lot of space for ramification into lots of high-bandwidth back-and-forth, as long as subtrees are collapsible (without collapsibility, each node always takes up physical space, so nodes that aren’t globally relevant have a bad cost/benefit ratio).
I find that I tend to notice a lot of that backchanneling consciously, possibly because I’m somewhat socially awkward. Although I’m sure I miss lots of it too. I agree that it’s important and somewhat hard to replicate elsewhere.
I do find that it can be replicated to a reasonable extent on video calls, especially if lag is very low, but only once you’re used to talking with a particular person in that medium. The first few calls with any one person tend to be awkward, but with collaborators & coworkers that I’ve done it many times with, video calls can recapture a substantial chunk of the bandwidth (relative to eg phone calls, or certainly email/chat).
For asynchronous collaboration tools, I find that spatial-hierarchical tree structures (eg mind maps, argument maps) create a lot of space for ramification into lots of high-bandwidth back-and-forth, as long as subtrees are collapsible (without collapsibility, each node always takes up physical space, so nodes that aren’t globally relevant have a bad cost/benefit ratio).