David, Hillary and the power of face to face

February 4, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Credit crunch, Social brain 

By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be affection and respect, shared values and purpose, or a hard headed sense of mutual dependence. It looks like Miliband and Clinton have all three.

The recession is now leading to deep cuts in corporate travel budgets, but the defenders of executive jet-hopping emphasise the importance of face to face contact in deal making. In contrast, on-line collaboration is proving to be an elusive goal.

Personal collaboration, involving working through different interests and perspectives, relies on a high level of reciprocal communication. If we disagree on one topic I need to know, or sense, enough about you to calculate what appeal I might make to other values or interests that you hold. I have also to believe that if I give up some ground, you may too. Face to face, most of this happens though processes of unconscious communication (the evidence for this has been gathered by Daniel Goleman in his book, Social Intelligence).

There are, of course, many examples of collaboration on-line: Linux, Wikipedia, campaigns like Obama’s, but these are all vertical processes in which participants contribute to a central shared objective on the basis of agreed rules of engagement. Horizontal collaboration, when people of the same status agree their own objectives, ways of working and mutual commitments, is different and much harder. This is one reason for the limited success (in relation to the overall scale of on-line activity) both of attempts to translate on-line exchange into off-line activity and of forms of web-based deliberation designed to get people of different views to listen and learn from each other. The unconscious clues that tell us co-operation and compromise will be matched and rewarded are simply not there.

Another dimension of this is reported by Jonah Lehrer.   It turns out that the social networks on Facebook are significantly different to those off-line. Whereas in the off-line world popular people tend to network with other popular people, in Facebook the networks of the most popular are often inhabited by those whose own networks are very small. As Lehrer concludes:     

Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is.

The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington.

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Comments

8 Comments on David, Hillary and the power of face to face

  1. mike reardon on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 11:10 am

    2. This is very interesting in the context of the ‘green digital revolution’ that makes great claims for the possibiltiess of networking as a means of reducing carbon footrprint and building e-based forms of social capital ( or should that be virtual capital?)?
    I think you pose some signficant challenges for the proponents of that thesis and they probably need to be more familar with the wider perspectives of social psychologists .
    On a personal note, I find e-based horizontal platforms only come to life as an adjunct to personal contact (and to take the point further, where contact is first extablished face to face).So if we hadrt been introduced at the Manchester RSA event I might not be posting this comment.!

  2. Katherine Hudson on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 1:20 pm

    3. If there’s one thing that’s apparent from the RSA networks project (http://www.thersa.org/fellowship/rsa-networks), it’s that online networks can’t function alone. It’s not a case of either/or, because online is a medium for communication. Clay Shirky, in his speech last year at the RSA, pointed out that if you want to get an online community going, the best way is to start with an offline meeting. This is exactly what we tried to do with the Manchester RSA event that Mike mentions. You can’t just rely on offline.

    I think one thing that you and Lehrer fail adequately to mention is the fact that networks online – such as Facebook – are flattened, removing the sense of hierarchy. So of course a popular person will have both unpopular and popular people in their online network. An outside observer would have no way of distinguishing between my best friend and an acquaintance from online interactions – indeed the reverse (I am more likely to use online communities to maintain relationships with people I do not meet regularly offline). As such, if a network does not appear to mimic the magic community of 150 people (http://lostmoya.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/150-equals-magic-social-net/), this is because not all my relationships with people in a network are equally close. It is only through the type of complex networks analysis that Karen Stephenson and others have done that you can interrogate this further, examining who is a key influencer or connector within a given network. This flatness is a real strength, as it provides something that doesn’t exist offline: the ability to feel free to contact anyone.

    Another thing about the online world is that it can mirror the chance happenings in the offline world, which are never true coincidence. So I will stumble upon something that interests me by following links from something I trust in the same way I might make a new friend through existing acquaintances with whom I share values and interests. So whilst I can’t see persuasive non-verbal signals, I have to rely on such shared characteristics as a hook.

    Of course the irony here is that this discussion is a mirror of an offline conversation we had yesterday…

  3. Duncan Lawie FRSA on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 2:01 pm

    4. There is some interesting research into the nature and successes of different forms of online community – an article about Live Journal (now ten, twice as old as Facebook) which suggests that depth is possible in an online relationship, but it requires commitment to the medium.

    “While a Twitter message (140 characters) or a Facebook status update (160
    characters) is designed to be extremely brief, LiveJournal users frequently
    write lengthy entries that encourage and solicit substantial comments from
    friends.”

    http://www.livejournalinc.com/LJ_Research_Report.pdf

    There is also an interesting quote from a more general piece of research, which goes some way to explaining the shape of online networks

    There are signicant social costs to rejecting someone . . . While it’s obvious
    why people would link to people that they know and like, it is sometimes
    difficult to explain why people Friend people they dislike, people who they
    hold power over or who hold power over them, and other awkward
    relationships. In short, it’s socially awkward to say no . . . . it’s much easier to
    just say yes than to face questions about why the sender was ignored or
    declined.

    http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1418/1336

  4. Indy on Wed, 4th Feb 2009 3:31 pm

    5. 1) I have to echo one of the commenters at Lehrer’s page. Fred Stutzman has written much more thoughtfully about some of the dynamics of social networks and it’d be fantastic if people would read his work (and that of various others) before they resort to facile comparisons between electronic and flesh worlds centred on the use of the word “friend” in Facebook.

    [We don't go from 5 to 500 "friends" using Facebook and few of us have only 5 "acquaintances" who are quite present in our real life.]

    2) There are software developers who have collaborated horizontally on projects for years (successfully) before they have met. Many academics have collaborated on research projects for a number of years before meeting.

    [They all eventually meet up, but that's because we live in a world where they can and we are human. If you work with someone for years, then the notion of going out for a beer looks pretty interesting, so you save up for your next holiday to be out in Australia or wherever.]

    We’ve had the ability to communicate deep context in text since the epistolary novel (see Lynn Hunt’s “Inventing Human Rights”) and a number of people who have grown up with the technology or been in a situation where they had to learn about it have developed strong skills in this regard. Robert Sapolsky amongst others has written about hormone studies which show certain kinds of computer interaction promote very similar reactions to face to face social grooming.

    Do these interactions generally result in face to face meetings? Yes, but why should that surprise us? When I was young, there were no cheap airlines and people would develop 10 year friendships with pen-pals in far flung corners of the world. Eventually they too would meet, but now why wait?

    The expectation that virtual collaboration should utterly displace physical seems bizarre. The value is that it reduces the component value of geography in the choice of both social and business relations – both choice of origination (Who do I choose to be “friends” with?) and continuation (Who do I choose to continue to be “friends” with?)

    3) Finally, since it’s an area of interest of mine, there’s a lot that can be done with video technologies that is typically not done at this time because, relatively, it’s not much cheaper than hopping on a plane. Besides – don’t we all like to hop on a plane now and then? I know I do! Perk of the job… Air travel will become much more expensive before people at the top end admit that the physical component might not be everything. However, as noted, way down the bottom of the food chain, from Chinese students studying abroad through Open Source developers seeking collaboration to academics on miserly funding, real horizontal virtual collaboration “languages, tools and techniques” are already developing.

  5. matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 12:04 pm

    6. Thanks Mike

    I agree with this. Although I also recognise Indy’s critique of mu musings and that there are many people who have thought about this more deeply than me. IN terms of on line stuff that encourages real world green activity, have you come across http://www.dothegreenthing.com/

  6. matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 12:06 pm

    7. Thanks Duncan. All useful points. I realise that this post was a bit shallow even by my standards. It’s something I will go back to in a few days when I’ve done a bit more reading and pondering

  7. matthewtaylor on Thu, 5th Feb 2009 12:08 pm

    8. Thanks Indy great comment and so much more informed than my blog! I will do some of the reading and thinking you suggest before entering these waters again. But I do thnk it is a fascinating topic. Maybe you could guest blog for me with 5-600 words on therelationship between on-line and off-line collaboration?

  8. Popular People » Blog Archive » David, Hillary and the Power of Face To Face | Matthew Taylor’s Blog on Sat, 7th Feb 2009 6:07 pm

    9. [...] By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be.Continue Reading… [...]

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