Flights of fancy

The more we communicate electronically, the more it makes us want to jump on a plane and meet in person.

By Graham Prophet, EDN Europe Editor -- EDN, 1/6/2000

Welcome to a new year and (arguably) a new century and millennium. I say "arguably" because there are some diehards holding to the viewpoint that the new millennium is still a year away. You have to admire such persistence, and, if they are still saying it in a year's time, we can pretend we all thought the same, and we've got an excuse for another party. Meanwhile, what new thinking can we bring to bear in this new era? For a start, we might begin to believe some of our own propaganda.

What I have in mind is the proposition you so often hear that telecommunications will provide us with "telepresence" and will reduce the need for physical travel. NetMeeting and videoconferencing will replace tiresome journeys to attend equally tiresome meetings. Sounds great, doesn't it? With our cities ever more strangled by traffic and choked by pollution, and air-traffic control struggling to find sufficient "slots" for all the flights that people want to take, high tech rides to the rescue. Don't take that car out of the garage, don't book that flight, get on the Net, meet in cyberspace, and help save the planet while you're about it.

Except, it doesn't work like that, does it? We are selling the videoconferencing systems, we are pulling the fibre, but what's happening? The planes are fuller than ever. And which industry is one of the worst offenders? You've got it: our own. Our business has much more than its fair share of people who will cheerfully travel halfway around the planet to present 20 PowerPoint slides. The same people who will present the message of the power of interconnectedness will, when you ask them, "Why are you still flying?," respond by saying, "Ah, but there's still value in the face-to-face encounter." The very same people who sell telecommunications technology will tell you proudly that they no longer have a permanent base and are travelling constantly. It's just as well for us that the industry has covered all the bases and also provides their mobile-interconnectivity tools.

A tale I've often repeated dates back a few years: An executive with an international semiconductor company was telling me how good its new videoconferencing suite was. As you might guess from what I've just written, I asked whether it saved on travel. He thought for a while. "You know," he said, "all the topics that got us across the Atlantic for high-powered meetings; they still take us across the Atlantic for high-powered meetings. And all the things they used to leave us to do ourselves they now hassle us about on the video link."

One argument is that we have yet to reach a critical threshold in bandwidth to make the "telepresence experience" a satisfactory substitute for face-to-face meetings. What, then, will it take—terabits of bandwidth and a fully immersive virtual-reality environment? I'm not (entirely) joking; there are those who talk in such terms. Whether this would be appropriate for the effective information bandwidth of most business meetings, I'll leave you to decide. All you can say is that the direction of the trend line is not encouraging from an environmental perspective; every sign so far is that the more we communicate electronically, the more it makes us want to jump on a plane and meet in person.

I once thought that this phenomenon involved a generation gap—that when a generation that had grown up with Sega and Nintendo and that regarded the computer screen as a natural interface moved into the workplace, things would change. Not a bit of it; they seem just as keen as anyone to be on the move. To be fair, some areas are changing. Significant numbers of us now commute less often to central offices and work effectively from our homes or local distributed offices. EDN is an excellent example, with its network of technical editors distributed in locations where their special interest industry sectors are concentrated.

It all goes to prove (as if proof were needed) that "futurology" is a tricky business, and predicting human reactions to change is even more so. It's looking as though telepresence will be an addition to—not a replacement for—regular travel. But as long as our own companies' representatives are packing the schedules as they shuttle between Munich and Milan, Stockholm and London, maybe we should quietly drop the hype about replacing needless travel. And, before we set off across continents to cluster around projection screens in drab rooms, perhaps we should consider if that extra dimension that comes with the personal encounter is really needed each and every time.

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