In Praise of Face-to-Face Interaction | Hiroyuki Ishida, Dean of the Graduate School of Health Management
2022.05.24
Aiming to "reclaim campus life from the coronavirus," Keio University made various preparations and shifted back to in-person classes starting in April 2022. In my work, I often visit multiple campuses, and although it is under the premise of a "new normal," I feel every day that a familiar sense of daily life and vitality is returning to all of them. When I hear students greet each other with "Ohayo!" (Good morning!) in the morning, I am surely not the only one who feels it is a special "Ohayo!" filled with two years' worth of emotion, as if to say, "We can finally see each other again!" Of course, this does not mean the past two years were a desperate "lost two years." During the COVID-19 pandemic, both faculty and students racked their brains and gained a great deal of experience, which has brought intangible and tangible assets to the university as a "corona legacy." The same is true for society. Although it already feels like a thing of the past, in the early discussions for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (before COVID-19), traffic congestion in Tokyo was cited as a major problem. Governor Koike promoted teleworking as a countermeasure, but I wonder how many companies truly took it seriously. Ironically, however, it was the invisible virus, rather than the governor's appeals in the media, that brought about a change in people's behavior. Innovation in communication technologies, including online meeting systems, accelerated at once. At the same time, many people realized their convenience, and online communication became completely accepted. However, after two years of online life, the negative aspects unique to it began to surface. Meanwhile, with the spread of vaccinations and the revelation that the Omicron variant is less likely to cause severe illness, the timing of a return to in-person activities began to be discussed at the national level. I also had the emotional thought that it would be unreasonable to replace nearly 200 years of continuous in-person education, dating back to the terakoya temple schools of the Edo period, with remote learning simply because of the recent two-year pandemic and technological innovation. Nevertheless, in a situation where anxiety about the risk of infection has not been completely eliminated, it is not easy to bring back to campus those who have grown accustomed to a secluded life for two years (in the first place, even before COVID-19, I had plenty of friends around me since my days at Juku High School who did not come to school). Against this backdrop, in my opening remarks to welcome new students to the Graduate School, I decided to talk about my praise for face-to-face interaction.
Influenced by a teacher from my days at Keio Futsubu School, I became passionate about electronics and audio, spending much of my time in the Akihabara Electric Town (not in maid cafes). The sound from the homemade amplifier I built by collecting parts was exceptional, and the sound source was, of course, vinyl records. It was in this context that CDs appeared in the 1980s, when I was a university student. As its name suggests, the CD was "compact." It was easy to handle, you could instantly listen to the track you wanted, it did not have the crackling sound, you did not have to flip it over, and so on. In terms of usability, it surpassed records in every aspect. For this reason of "convenience," records were quickly supplanted by CDs, but among some experts and musicians, the established theory was that "CDs have poor sound quality." As you know, records are analog signals and CDs are digital signals. The analog-to-digital conversion (AD conversion) involves dividing one second of the continuous analog signal wave 44,100 times (sampling) and replacing the pitch (frequency band) and volume (dynamic range) with a signal of 0s and 1s (this is the CD standard devised by Sony and Philips). The audible range for the human ear is from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, and this standard was reportedly decided with this in mind. Therefore, with CDs, most sounds that do not fall within this audible range were discarded. Furthermore, even with 44,100 samples, some data within the audible range is lost, so the analog information is not perfectly copied and pasted onto the CD. One might argue that the number of samples should be increased, but this creates a trade-off: increasing the sampling rate makes the data heavier, so it no longer fits on a single CD. In other words, this is the limit of the CD. Incidentally, net audio (compressed audio), which is now mainstream, has even more data loss, so to me, it sounds hollow.
Now, we are seeing signs of a vinyl record revival. It is not just a retro boom; it seems that a generation unfamiliar with records has listened to them anew and rediscovered their excellent sound quality. They say the sense of atmosphere and warmth emitted from records is a charm that CDs lack. I have digressed, but what I want to emphasize is that among the things we have discarded in favor of convenience, there is actually important information that should not have been thrown away. And, surprisingly, humans are animals with an excellent ability to discern, distinguish, and feel this important information. Is not the fact that many companies and educational institutions have shifted back to in-person activities, at a time when the pandemic has not necessarily subsided, a result of realizing this? Not limited to classes, I have often experienced over the past two years that there are limits to the information conveyed through screens and text, and that it is sometimes not transmitted in the correct form. What supports the "vigorous debate on diverse topics" that our Graduate School values is the connection between people—human relationships—and I simply cannot imagine that this can be cultivated in an online environment. "Let's definitely meet on campus." This was the first message I, as the Dean of the Graduate School, conveyed to the new students.