Thanks to COVID-19, big changes have taken place almost overnight in the ways that we communicate with each other. Tools such as Zoom and Teams, Skype and Webex, offering video-based meeting facilities, are not new – some have been around since the last century – but far fewer of us were using them until February 2020. They have since become part of everyone’s daily lives, transforming the ways in which learning is delivered in schools, colleges, and universities; business meetings are held; societies deliver lectures and events; faith groups deliver religious services; and arts organisations put on concerts, performances, and exhibitions.
It’s not the same as hanging out with real people, and we are all longing for some live interaction again – the difference, for example, between watching sport on TV or listening to music on CD and being part of the crowd at a live game, concert, or gig. But it has shown us that it is possible to connect people in ways that were considered the stuff of fantasy or science fiction only two decades ago, and it has added tools to our repertoire that will make a permanent difference to the ways in which people live their lives and do their work, widening the range of activities that we will undertake in future sitting in front of a screen.
But this great leap forward in interpersonal communication has yet to be matched by data connectivity – that is to say, in our ability to search across the mountains of data held around the world to produce meaningful answers to quite simple questions. Google is excellent at listing websites that might hold relevant information, and Wikipedia does a very good job of providing a condensed overview of any particular topic, but try (as many public bodies did earlier this year) to produce a list of public monuments commemorating people with slavery or empire connections and it will take many months to get even a partial answer.
