When the telephone was invented, people expected hotel industry employment to plummet because it would eliminate all the jobs for message runners and bell captains on every floor. Instead, the telephone so facilitated business travel that many more hotels were opened and total employment rose.

I wonder if the internet isn’t having the same effect. We now have more people with whom we interact in distant places, which increases our desire to visit those places. Videoconferencing might have a similar effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_the_Game

This arrangement will work for us: our conference is an exchange of current research findings. However, I agree with Eric that anything reliant on shared experience–e.g., the meetings of professional organizations, where re-connecting with peers is a vital part of the agenda–is limited sans the empathy-driven ties that occur during in-the-flesh intercourse.

Off topic…I LOVED Transformations–brilliant, Grant!!

Earlier we’ve worked with HP on their Halo conference system (the one that loses all the publicity wars to Cisco’s competing product – see the graphic in the posting) and although they can do some wonderful things at the high end of technology, the cost – and thus the availability of the technology – has been very limiting.

Agreed that this is a major issue right now in business – in the weeks that we’ve been engaged in this research there have been many major press stories about the technologies, the shifts in knowledge work in general, etc. etc.

But for some transactions, we also need to meet our counterparts personally. Videoconferencing offers us more than the phone but something less than the personal meeting. I wonder if that stuff which is “less” is why the tipping point for VC is always permanently imminent. Perhaps we need to feel a person’s handshake or smell their cologne or see the dilation of their pupils in order to know them, or to feel that we do.