Fresh Air tech contributorAlexis Madrigal considers the conference call and how the way we communicate with coworkers has changed:
Every day, at 6:30am, I join a conference call with colleagues on the east coast. I call an 800-number, then enter a six-digit conference room number, then a pin number. And despite the group remaining largely unchanged, once a week, something goes wrong. When I conference with outsiders, there’s a problem every other call.
There’s the oops-I-got-the-wrong-dial-in problem. There’s the pin-number-is-too-long-to-remember problem. There’s the-is-so-and-so-on-the-line problem. And the someone-hasn’t-muted-the-line-and-is-a-mouth-breather-problem. Meetings are convened to bring people together, and yet our conference calls prevent communication as often as they enable it.
So, what’s going on? Why hasn’t some tech startup fixed this? The key problem with conference calls is that they attempt to connect various telecom networks that have been built on top of the legacy phone network, which is as old as Alexander Graham Bell. We’re all trying to hack this nearly century old system of communication to fit the needs of a world that wants everything to act like the Internet.