Recently we held an Annual General Meeting (AGM) of a UK charity we are involved in, as an online event. It took us a couple of days to organise, cost very little other than some time, and there was a good attendance. The meeting started on time at 6.00pm, all items were covered giving ample time for a Q&A session and was over by 7.30pm. In addition to the UK audience, this year for the first time, a number of delegates from Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia also took part.
During previous years when we held this event in Manchester, it would take us months to organise, cost quite a bit on hall hire, food and decorations and the band. Even then it was mainly the local people who would attend due to the time and travel it would involve. The committed few who would travel from further afield, had to set off midday to get to the venue in time. Even then some would get caught in traffic, or face parking problems when they arrive, forcing the event to start late, much to the annoyance of those who arrived on time. However, apart from the business of the meeting, it provided an opportunity to meet your friends, enjoy a delicious dinner and a dance into the night. Thereafter the locals would go home, and the long-distance traveller would retire to a hotel for the night to drive back home the next day. That was the type of meeting we were planning to have in April, when Covid-19 hit the shores of the UK bringing all gatherings to a halt.
Faced with a sudden and enforced lockdown, people across the globe had to look for ways to keep live and work. This is when Internet – technology that was invented to withstand a nuclear attack, came to its own. Suddenly people found on the internet a plethora of easy to use tools known as ‘Apps’, often free, that would allow them to communicate, collaborate and shop easily from the safety of their homes whilst maintaining social distancing. Demand for cloud based collaborative technologies skyrocketed as individuals as well as organisations started using them in earnest to work, shop and learn from home and have a quality of life which would have been impossible otherwise.
Applications such as Microsoft 365 / Teams and Google’s G Suite / Meet made it possible for employees to access their work files and link up with colleagues and work from home. Video conferencing App Zoom jumped from 10 million users in December 2019 to 300 million users by the end of April 2020, becoming the default video conference tool for industry. Individuals who mastered it at work started using it at home, due to its ease of use, free for home use and attractive business pricing.
Our AGM this year was conducted online via Zoom. While we could provide the dinner dance, Zoom made it possible for our delegates numbering over 40 from across 3 continents, to take part in the proceedings in real-time from the comfort and safety of their own homes, using a device of their choice with no phone bill to pay at the end. Such is the power of communication technology today!
This meeting reminded me of an experience I had with communication technology, during my student days in India in the late 1970s. In those days our mode of communication was an occasional handwritten letter from my parents or siblings by post, to which I would write a reply when I got time. On one occasion I needed to speak to someone in Colombo, Sri Lanka about an urgent matter over the telephone. As the payphone in my hostel only allowed local calls and although Colombo was less than 400 miles away, I had to go to the central post office to book an ‘operator assisted call’ to speak to him. I got to the post office, gave the operator the number to call and took my place in the queue awaiting my turn. The public phone was in a corner behind a screen and not enclosed in a booth due to the hot weather. As most people were unfamiliar with phones, they spoke so loudly that everybody knew every detail of everyone else’s business. I couldn’t help wondering why they paid for the call at all, when they were loud enough to be heard by the person on the other end – without a phone!
When my turn came, I went behind the screen and picked up the phone. After several attempts the operator put me through and after many ‘Hellos’ to make sure that I was heard, and I quickly blurted out my message through a crackly line and asked him to repeat it just to make sure he had heard me correctly. Being conscious of the long queue behind me and the high cost of ‘a metered international call’ I finished as fast as I could, paid the bill of 100 Rupees (a day’s wage for a man) and left. Little did I know at the time that a humble telephone would be transformed into a pocket computer – well beyond my dreams in a few decades time.
Late Arthur C Clarke predicted this phenomena when he described, (BBC Horizons, 1964),
- “A world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever they may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don’t know their actual physical location.”
- “When a man could conduct his business from Haiti or Bali just as well as from London.”
- “A day when a brain surgeon in Edinburgh performed an operation on a patient in New Zealand.”
- “A day when the traditional role of the city as the meeting place of man would cease to exist.”
- “A day when men will no longer commute but will communicate. They won’t have to travel for business anymore but will only travel for pleasure.”
Looking at this AGM experience, and how people have lived and worked during the lockdown, I would say that Clarke was spot on and that day is here and it is here to stay.
Let’s hope as he did, “When that day comes, and when the city is abolished, the whole world will not be turned into one giant concrete suburb.”
