Telepresence World is next week. Telepresence, for those who haven’t experienced it, refers to videoconferencing that renders the “remote participants life-size, with fluid motion, accurate flesh-tones and flawless audio.” This isn’t the rinky-dink stuff that you do with a webcam and a copy of your favorite instant messenger application, but the stuff that’s going on at Fortune 1000 corporations with rooms full of fancy hardware installed on the other side of imposing solid-wood conference tables.
Cisco is making a major push in this area, and there are a number of well-funded smaller companies with hardware for sale today. Setting up telepresence-connected meeting rooms isn’t the stuff of science fiction these days, but simply a matter of finding the appropriate budget, and that budget is getting less astronomical all the time.
You’d think this stuff, offering another means of rich communication across long distances, would be a natural for web workers. And yet, I wonder.
When I look around at the way that web workers deal with communications, it seems to me that we’re more often focused on efficiency of information exchange than on the immersiveness of the process itself. In our world, the significant factor has been the rise of richly-interlinked, easily-searchable, folksonomy-enabled tools that let us quickly navigate the vast sea of information we need to do our jobs. We don’t use Google or Basecamp or del.icio.us or Adium because they look good; we use them because they excel at delivering the nuggets of information that we need, when we need them.
Telepresence, by contrast, comes from the other side of the busyness vs. burst cultural divide. If you’re communicating with your boss by old-style instant-message conference, you likely have the spare bandwidth to also be getting some “real work” done, especially because those further up the corporate hierarchy tend to be those with the weakest typing skills. In a telepresence meeting, by contrast, it’s blindingly obvious if you’re not paying attention. Indeed, many of the telepresence vendors also tie in to more generalized presence solutions, billed as helping keep track of partners and colleagues so that you can launch conferences and, perhaps not incidentally, know when they’re actually working.
It seems to me that many telepresence efforts are fundamentally conservative. They’re an attempt to use a new medium (the Internet) to preserve an old pattern (the face-to-face meeting), rather than understanding the strengths of the new medium. While there are certainly good uses for this technology, from contract negotiations to educational seminars, in general it doesn’t offer a lot to the web worker who is already out on the cutting edge of multiple methods of connectivity. The good news is that by the time your corporate overlords get around to trying to control everything by telepresence, it will probably be too late.
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