Why does a video call feels empty compared to a handshake? How does physical absence break the social contract? What happens to trust in remote work?
For generations, professional trust relied on a simple, physical toolkit.
We shook hands.
We looked each other in the eye across a table.
We shared coffee during breaks.
These were not just social niceties.
According to decades of research in sociology and communication theory, these physical acts provided a high-bandwidth environment where we could rapidly verify if a person was trustworthy.
When the world shifted to remote work, we removed the travel but we lost much more than the commute.
We lost the underlying machinery that makes human connection effective.
To understand why a day of video calls leaves us feeling isolated rather than connected, we must look at what happens when bodies disappear from the room.
The literature identifies three primary deficits.
These are the loss of media richness, the disappearance of physical nearness, and the erosion of “social presence”.
Of these, the erosion of social presence is the most unsettling.
Social Presence Theory measures how “real” a person feels during an interaction.
In a physical room, presence is the default state.
You cannot ignore a person standing three feet away from you.
In digital environments, presence is not a default.
It is a variable that we must actively manufacture.
Research indicates that screen-based communication is inherently lower in social presence.
This leads us to perceive the person on the other end not as a human being, but as an abstract entity.
When visual cues like shared eye contact are stripped away, the “other” becomes less real.
This explains a common frustration in the digital age.
When a colleague does not respond to an email, some may feel slighted.
In a physical office, we would see that they are overwhelmed or on the phone.
In a digital inbox, their silence is ambiguous and breeds mistrust.
This deficit is compounded by the loss of what economists call “costly signaling.”
In uncertain environments, humans use expensive signals to prove they are serious.
Historically, traveling to a conference or a meeting was a costly signal.
It required money for flights, time away from family, and significant effort.
The mere act of showing up proved that you were committed.
It instantly categorized you as an “insider”.
Digital interactions have almost no cost.
Joining a video call is cheap and requires little effort.
Consequently, showing up on a screen acts as a weak signal.
It fails to distinguish the committed partner from the casual observer.
This helps explain why it is so hard to build deep trust remotely.
The filter is too porous.
It admits too much noise.
To solve this, organizations must do more than just replace a physical-space meeting with a Zoom link.
They must engage in the architectural reconstruction of these social dynamics using digital tools.
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References
- Daft, R.L. and Lengel, R.H. (1986) ‘Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design’, Management Science, 32(5), pp. 554–571. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.32.5.554
- Gunawardena, C.N. (1995) ‘Social Presence Theory and Implications for Interaction and Collaborative Learning in Computer Conferences’, International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1(2), pp. 147–166. Available at: https://www.learntechlib.org/p/15156/
- Short, J., Williams, E. and Christie, B. (1976) The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. London: John Wiley & Sons. (Foundational text for Social Presence Theory).
- Spence, M. (1973) ‘Job Market Signaling’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), pp. 355–374. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/1882010
About the image
The Distance Between Faces © The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection 2025. This installation assembles multiple profiles into a single, stratified form, as if presence itself were built in layers rather than held in one body. Faces emerge, overlap, and recede, their contours sliced into thin planes that suggest proximity without touch and recognition without contact. What appears continuous is in fact segmented, revealing how connection can feel intact while being materially interrupted. The work invites reflection on how trust is formed when bodies no longer share space, and how human presence, once immediate and undeniable, becomes something reconstructed, patiently, imperfectly, through traces, signals, and accumulated attention rather than physical closeness.