Why does a senior executive cross the Atlantic to agree an important business contract rather than use a video-conference to seal the deal? Why do people feel it is important to be in the office as much as they can rather than working online from home and saving themselves the time, cost and hassle of travel?
The ‘specialness’ of face-to-face meeting has, until recently, been almost universally recognised. But as new communication technology opens up more possibilities for connecting with people, some have begun to question the importance of place in determining the way a relationship develops.
One of the leading thinkers in this area is geography professor Doreen Massey, and I have recently been reading her book ‘For Space’ (Sage, London, 2005). I should admit that I haven’t read it all yet, but what I have read has been stimulating.
A key theme in Massey’s work is the difference – or, in her thinking, the lack of difference – between ‘space’ and ‘place’. Doreen thinks relationally, so space for her is the sum of our relationships and interconnections. Each of these relationships has what she calls a trajectory, or what we might call a ‘story’. The individual stories of people’s lives interconnect with each other every time a person sends an email, a text message, or makes a telephone call.
From this perspective, the places where people physically meet become less important. We can meet, and our stories can interconnect, in a ‘space’ just as effectively as in a physical place. Although she does not say this explicitly, it seems to me that she implies that space – or virtual place – and real place are doing the same job, in the same way, with the same effect of enabling interconnections between people’s lives and thus helping relationships to develop and mature.
This all sounds so eminently relational that you might wonder why I could possibly feel uneasy. Let me try and explain the reasons for my discomfort. I believe ‘space’ is no substitute for ‘place’. There is something qualitatively different when people meet face-to- face than when they ‘meet’ on, say, the internet. It is partly about sheer quantity of communication which takes place when people meet face-to-face relative to an exchange of emails. To begin with there is facial communication – research has shown that we can recognise 10,000 expressions on another person’s face, but you can’t see any of these in cyberspace. In addition there is ‘body language’, tone of voice, and the fact that face-to-face exchanges are simultaneous rather than staggered.
You may argue that some of this information could be gathered in other ways, perhaps from a third person known to both parties in the relationship. However, as well as being indirect, this takes time. When so many people are unwilling to go next door to a colleague’s office to check out a fact, I can’t see much chance of them taking time to have a longer conversation to verify a third party’s credentials.
But even all this doesn’t fully explain to me why I trust someone so much more if I meet them face-to-face, why I feel I ‘know’ them in an entirely different way and why a personal meeting triggers a much greater sense of obligation. I have been trying to pin this down for a while, and would love to hear your views.
One last thought. If the physical presence of people in the same locality is so important to our relationships, our emotions, our intellects, our sense of moral obligation and our capacity to deliver certain forms of help (such as shopping or gardening), then we need to be concerned about building real rather than just virtual communities.
I am told that Britain ‘exports’ as well as ‘imports’ a higher proportion of its population than any other country. Although such high levels of ‘mobility of labour’ may mean little in terms of the total population level, it is of enormous significance in terms of building stable and caring communities.
If our political leaders are truly concerned about the well-being of the most vulnerable in our country, then they need to focus much more on roots and rootedness as a priority in public policy. It is those who know people face-to-face who, on a long-term basis, will provide them with the support they need. Otherwise we will have a society which is as dependent on state welfare provision as a drug addict is on their habit.
MICHAEL SCHLUTER