Unless you have been living under a rock, the fact that we live in an ever more networked world will not have escaped you. More and more of our lives take place online. Services that once necessitated a physical meeting between two or more people are now available online. Here is a brief guide to 4 formerly face-to-face activities that can now be conducted through a screen.
Music Lessons
Prospective music students no longer need to find an experienced teacher in-person to improve their acumen. There are many ways in which music lessons can be accessed online – from YouTube tutorials to dedicated learning portals like playsaxophone.net. Music theory is famously hard for beginners to grasp, so the availability of online learning platforms is a welcome development for students wanting to get a basic idea of theory before they attempt face-to-face lessons.
Therapy
Psychotherapy is an incredibly important service for many people. Luckily, it is also a service that has successfully moved partially online. Video conferencing tools like Zoom have facilitated a mass migration of therapeutic services. Your therapist doesn’t even need to live on the same continent as you anymore! The movement of therapy online has also allowed non-profit therapeutic organizations to offer free or cheap remote therapy to people in need.
Large online therapy and counseling companies like BetterHelp have come under scrutiny for their commercial models. Of course, Therapy-as-a-product has been around since the mid 20th century, but that does not mean it should not be investigated as a poor therapeutic structure.
Office Work
In 202118 percent of people work remotely full time18 percent of people work remotely full time. This is not entirely the fault of the pandemic. New advances in remote conferencing technology and cloud computing have made remote working a far more economically sound concept for businesses to swallow in recent years. Cloud computing has had an especially large impact. Because computing and data storage are now more often remote than on-site, companies now have less incentive to make their employees work at the office. Some companies have gone so far as to host their employees online permanently and completely eradicate mandatory office working hours.
Medical Care
If you have tried to get a doctor’s appointment during the covid-19 pandemic, then you will know that many doctors are now offering online consultations, or at least changing the booking system to being online for ease of access. The move to online consultation may be a partial solution to an issue that has plagued General Practitioners and their patients for many years – overcrowding and oversubscription. Doctors can, in theory, process more patient inquiries and give out more advice if they are allowed to do so online. There is no substitute for an in-person diagnosis, however. If a doctor believes that you need an examination, they will still call you into their surgery. Moving online has proven to be a relatively complex task. Questions have been raised about the effect that digital inequality will have on healthcare if more and more of it is being conducted online.
