The best tools and services can do for real world interaction is to simply augment it. It can't be replicated nor replaced. Now that we have a critical mass of people using the Internet as a facet of everyday life, there is a rich spectrum of methods for augmenting social interaction to explore. One key dimension is how tools and services compensate for how the medium isn't relatively rich.
Remote and In-person Collaboration
Over the past few days I spent a great deal of time with remote members of the Socialtext team. Inter-personal communication is more than talk. Its made up of verbal and non-verbal cues. With a distributed organization you have to make up for the lack of cues, which has costs and benefits. When we get together it makes the difference between real world interaction and augmented remote interaction even clearer.
What we have found through augmenting our remote collaboration with our tool, IM and phone is a productive way of working that de-emphasizes emotion. Its almost like how when someone looses a sense they make up for it with the remaining five. You become more attuned to cues on calls: pauses, inflections, grunts, etc. But what really makes it works is a heightened sense for when an issue becomes emotional, something natural when you are passionate about your work, and mediating differences as soon as they arise.
We largely work within wiki, a medium that begets trust by giving up control. It also de-emphasizes personality and focuses on the substance of written content. When we get together in person, we have a rich body of shared understanding to draw from, but positions and background are revealed. This helps not just to augment meetings, but pacify them, so we seek to get the business part of the meeting quickly so we can simply enjoy each other's company.
If you blog publicly you have had similar experiences when you meet blog buddies. So much shared understanding puts to rest portions of the conversation and provides a productive basis for higher bandwidth exchange.
Frontiers of Understanding Cues
Researchers have long understood the primacy of cues. Our brains process facial cues them quicker than spoken word. Now researchers are using MRIs to reveal the same is true for body cues. Follow that link to the new Loom blog and a story that begins with Darwin's study of the expresions of emotions. For more on the study of emotions and how we are augmenting our capabilities to control them through neuroscience, see Brainwaves.
Emotions and Relationships at Distance
Beyond Smilies :-), many technologies attempt to help convey emotion at distance. One of the more interesting approaches is 3dme, which allows you to convey mood entered along eight dimensions through an avatar. What works about this approach is it provides a representation of facial cues that is open to interpretation. It doesn't explicitly codify an emotion nor transmit it with perfect clarity, but that's okay, the point gets across.
Conveying emotions is similar to the concerns people have about conveying identity and relationships in social networking. Of course these services do not capture the essence and facets of identity. Of course they don't capture the varying degrees and facets of relationships. I don't think they try to either. They are simply games that provide iconic profiles and proxies of ties -- much is left open to interpretation. Similar to how a price in a transaction represents a shared understanding of value between two parties at a moment in time even through the two parties have different understandings of underyling value or utility. The price doesn't capture all aspects of exchange, but agreeing to one speeds the transactional relationship.
Text is an amazingly rich medium for expressing emotion and fostering relationships, but it isn't as efficient as other modalities. Bloggers who are accustomed to the dedication and relatively slow pace of building relationships post-by-post often find social networking too transactional. Different networks will require different approaches (e.g. personal, dating, cultural and business networking), each with its own balance of rich modalities and transactional proxies. Of all the social networking services, because of the network it seeks to serve, Tribe is perhaps at the golden mean within this rich spectrum. Meetup is at the rich end and LinkedIn accels at proxy.
A Walk Through the Woods
To understand the future you can shape it, but also look to our children. What's fascinating about the Netgeners is not just how connected they are, but how they have discrete modes of being on and off. The other way to understand the future is watch what Joi does.
Disconnecting for a while helped me realize the strong difference between on and off and how we need both. Similarly we need time for F2F and M2M, but its less binary. The spectrum of richness that our modalities afford is gradually skewing towards augmenting F2F in increasingly mobile ways. I don't fear this change because we have a profound ability to adapt and compensate. Whether in making up for a lack of social cues or an abundance of information.
Here's a detailed DCRP Review that clinched it for me. Only drawbacks so far is the relatively large form factor and distribution of controls throughout the body that I may simply haven't gotten used to yet.
The one piece of schwag I picked up was a Logitech 