BLOG: Human touch keenly missed in COVID-19 months
These days, we are each on a side of a screen and each can see the other, yet the interaction feels unreal. It is so different from sitting across a table or side by side in the same conference hall, chatting about markets, with no nanosecond time delay, no digital shimmy, no occasional buffering. I’m sure many of my market contacts outside of China feel the same sense of detachment that I have been through. That "virtual meet-ups" are not nearly as rewarding or useful as real-world interaction.
China emerged from the COVID-19 epidemic in March 2020 and was sufficiently confident that the scourge had been vanquished that companies and organizations have begun to hold large-scale domestic industrial events since latter half of last year without too much concern. Admittedly though, foreign delegates have been missing from such events for nearly one and a half years.
Yet while overseas market sources’ yearning for market information has been growing so visibly, as they could not be physically present in China, they have to be contented with gauging market sentiment themselves with smartphones, social media and virtual events are at their fingertips as tools to gather market intelligence from all sorts of sources.
COVID-19 has brought about so many changes in daily work and life, propelling people to rethink whether technology itself can suffice and replace a lot of real human contact in the real world.
Just like me, many will probably miss the day that we can get on a flight to a conference venue, shake hands with our industry friends, swap name cards or scan WeChat QR codes, and physically sit in a conference, watching and listening to presenters sharing their insights.
source: MC-CCPIT, a ferrous event in Shanghai
One more thing that all these COVID-19 months have taught me is that I no longer fret that one day, smart phones and the virtual world will replace the real world. I’ve found that we will still need to gather with friends in a café, chatting and laughing together; we will still need to spend quality time with parents despite all the video calls, and we will still want to be somewhere to feel the market atmosphere ourselves instead of sitting on the other side of the screen.
Simply being there still matters a lot. I look forward to the day that I can fly to somewhere for an industrial event. I’ll stop complaining the ungodly hours, the long-haul flights, or the jetlags, as this crisis teaches us to value what matters.
Well, for now, conference calls are all that we have, and it’s time to get the presentation ready for the next virtual meeting.
Written by Hongmei Li, li.hongmei@mysteel.com
Edited by Russ McCulloch, russ.mcculloch@mysteel.com
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