Your sudden enthusiasm for virtual meetings is beginning to worry me

Screenshot from Zoom meting. Image Source: Reshape.

I live about 100 kilometers away from my workplace. A round trip takes at least 2 hours, up to 4 by public transport. That’s why, for the past 5 years, I’ve had a home-office contract which allows me to do part of my job remotely.

My husband works for a company that has sections in several other countries, including India, the USA, and Great Britain. He, too, is used to teleconferences with participants from several time-zones.

This makes me think my family was probably better prepared for the covid lockdown than many others. For the same reason though, we also had more time to contemplate the pros and cons of remote collaboration.

The pros are clear: Less time wasted in transit. Less carbon dioxide emitted. Less germs circulated.

And with more people in the same situation, the pros have proliferated. I have, for example, been thrilled to see the spike in online seminars. Suddenly, even I am able to find seminars that are actually interesting for my research! Better still, if it turns out they’re not as interesting as anticipated, no one notices if I virtually sneak out. Also, asking for a virtual meeting has become routine. Everyone is now familiar with screen sharing and prepared to tolerate the hassle of lagging vids or chopped audios.

These have been positive developments, and many of them deserve to be carried forward. Traveling for seminars or colloquia has long been absurdly out-of-date. We all know that a lot of speakers will give the same seminar dozens of times to largely disinterested audiences, when those who actually wanted to hear it could as well have called into the same online meeting, or watched a recording.

Or consider this. I have frequently gotten invitations from overseas institutions that were prepared to fly me in and out for giving a one-hour talk. This isn’t only ecologically insane, it’s also a bad use of researchers’ time. A lot of my colleagues work while on planes and in airports, and of course I do, too, but let’s be honest: It’s not quality time. Traveling is disruptive, both mentally and metabolically. And that’s leaving aside that it screws up the work-life balance.

So, yes, scientists could certainly slim down those seminar series and cut back traveling quite a bit. But as researchers are becoming more familiar with virtual meetings and teleconferences, I fear some of them are getting carried away.

I’ve seen scientists on social media seriously discussing that seminar series should remain online-only even post-pandemic. Virtual conferences are supposedly better than the real thing. And if you listen to them, there’s nothing, it seems, you can’t get done on Zoom.

Let us therefore talk about the cons.

Virtual collaborations work well as long as you know the people in real life already. Even with both audio and video, a lot of information that humans draw on to efficiently communicate is missing. Through a screen, you neither get body language nor the context from chatter in the hallway or just from physically being in the same room. These cues are important for deliberation and argumentation to work properly.

I know this sounds somewhat Neanderthal, but fact is that evolution didn’t prepare us to communicate  through webcams.

This has long been known to sociologists who therefore recommend that teams which collaborate remotely meet in person at least a few times a year, a recommendation that my husband’s employer strictly follows. The occasional in-person meeting, so the idea, provides team members with the required information to understand where the others are coming from. It is especially important to introduce new members to a group.

A good starting point to get a sense of the troubles that remote collaboration can bring is the 2005 report by the (US-American) National Defense Research Institute on “Challenges in Virtual Collaboration”. Summarizing the published literature, they find that during video- and audio-conferences “local coalitions can form in which participants tend to agree more with those in the same room than with those on the other end of the line” and that computer-mediated communication has “shown to increase polarization, deindividuation, and disinhibition. That is, individuals may become more extreme in their thinking, less sensitive to interpersonal aspects of their messages, and more honest and candid.”

Online-only scientific collaboration and conferences would therefore most likely work well for some time, but eventually communication would suffer. Especially those who currently praise the zoomiverse for its supposed inclusivity, as this recent piece in SciAm, simply have not thought it through.

You see, regardless of how much effort we put into online conferencing and meeting, there will still be people who know each other in real life. These will be those who just happen to work or live near each other, or who have the funds to travel. Unless you actually want to forbid everyone to meet in real life, this will create a two-class community. Those who can meet. And those who can’t.

At present, most funding agencies acknowledge the need to occasionally see each other in person to collaborate effectively. If that would no longer be the case, then it would be especially the already disadvantaged people who would suffer because they would become remote-only participants. The Ivy League, I am sure, would find a way to continue having drinks together one way or the other.

None of this is to say that I am against virtual conferences or remote collaboration. But international collaboration has been a boon to science. And abstract ideas, like the ones we deal with in the foundations of physics, are hard to get across; having to pipe them through glass fiber cables doesn’t help. As we discuss how to reduce traveling, let us not forget that communication is absolutely essential to science.