A Virtual Hug

You can’t replace a hug with a virtual hug.

And yet, when you can’t have a hug, a virtual hug can mean everything.

I first started using online tools for communication in ways that mattered to me, as mechanisms to substitute for specific face-to-face interactions, in 2003. That was the year that I moved from the Bay Area to New York to begin my graduate studies in education. In that first year, I started using Skype to work at distance with my friend Jeremy Richardson (aka Coppercat) to work on music, to keep in touch, and to generally hangout. By the following year, We were using Skype video chat regularly. It was a glorious pixelated catastrophe, and we were delighted to be able to see crude approximations of one another’s faces, to talk in real time on the internet, and to send beats and melodies back and forth as we crafted songs together.

In the second half of the 2004/2005 academic year, a couple of my friends and my brother managed to convince me to start playing World of Warcraft. I had no idea at the time that this would ultimately become the topic of my dissertation, but what I recognized instantly was the kinship that playing WoW had with working on tunes remotely. Both of these digital spaces enabled me to have real, meaningful, human interactions with other people who I cared about. In the instance of Wow, I would both experience and bear witness to the ways in which those digital spaces provided opportunities to make meaningful human connections with people who were strangers before you met them online, but would become guild mates, friends, and in some instances much more than that.

You might be wondering what all of this has to do with COVID-19. We are at an inflection point in human history. It’s simply undeniable that things now are not like they were a week ago here in the United States let alone the world, and that they never really will be again. Our president in the US might say that we’ll beat this thing in three weeks, but I got the word today that in my workplace we’ll be offering all classes online for the summer, and possibly even for the fall. Life has rather abruptly moved online for a whole lot of people, and this is where the question of hugs and virtual hugs starts to matter a lot.

There’s a post that’s been making the rounds recently in my neck of the woods, and I need to say I absolutely respect the intention of this post. However, as my mom said the other day, we’re not at war here, much as the analogy is in vogue.

As she said, the better analogy is an alien invasion. Humans didn’t start it with other humans, it’s global, and it forces us to see absolutely everything differently if we’re willing to move beyond denial. If we collectively fail to do so, this will just be round one, and the subsequent rounds are not likely to be better.

Life is never going to be like it was before COVID-19, and getting through this involves getting beyond our assumptions of how life is supposed to be.

So, in the space of education, I’m asking you to take things one step at a time. To recognize that a virtual hug can never replace a real hug, and a virtual classroom will not do what a physical classroom can. But when you can’t get a real hug, a virtual hug can literally save a life, as long as it’s sent with real intention, and real love. And when you can’t offer a physical classroom, a virtual classroom can give a path forward, but only if it’s done with the best effort you can muster.

Take things one step at a time, but make your best effort to support your students in this crisis. This isn’t actually about you. When your institution asks you to take your classes online right now, it’s not about their profits, and it’s not about the rights your union is protecting. It’s about your students. If you have it in you, and you might not, and I need to emphasize, that’s okay, but if you have it in you, just do your best, one step at a time, to make that virtual classroom as good as you can.

If you’re working with me, or the other “digital immigrants” out there who have colonized this space when it was young, we’re here to support you. If you have it in you, we’ll do what we can together to give the best virtual hugs that we can, because for now, there’s no touching, so virtual hugs are what we have to work with.