The second question I wanted to address this week was written by Rachel. And she wrote, propinquity, or physical proximity, is it still relevant in today's digital world? And I think the question here is really about in today's digital world, is relating or relationships, are they less strong, is the nature of those relationships changing? And, I think, you'll find that even in our most wired universities, there's been research at Harvard and here, that people tend to collaborate more with people that are next to them, locally. And that those collaborations tend to be more productive. So we have some evidence that even in a very wired, high technology place like Stanford, that there is this kind of return to being in the same place. I think most of you said it will never replace face to face interaction. And I think the reasons people remarked on are quite convincing. And it's particularly, I mean, all you have to really think about is the kind of communication you had in a conference call, and the kind of commitment you made to listening to it. So all of us have been on a conference call, and we multitask, right? And I'll do my laundry. Whereas in a meeting, that's not the case. And so you have visual cues, and you can see gestures and you could see facial expressions and the like in a face to face meeting. And you start to see emotional aspects of how someone aligns with you. As opposed to online, it's more difficult. So, the same thing with e-mail. Sometimes we read into things, or we don't see emotional kinds of alignments that are positive. So, a lot of the research that's coming out on these distributed teams that use technology devices suggest that people try to be more explicit in their moral and emotional references. So for example, using exclamation marks, smiley faces, emoticons. Same when you come in on a phone call, or a conference call. I'm here, or I'm leaving or I heard that. That there's more of an explicit moral set of cues that people have to make in those contexts, because we don't get them online. But we do in person. We see them when we gauge someone in a conversation. It's funny, though. A colleague and I here did studies of speed dating where we audio recorded people, and we tried to figure out what makes people relate more or feel a sense of social bonding with each other. And we looked at things like the obvious stuff, which is appearances and status. And then we looked at other things like talk, how people spoke, the actual lexical cues they used, as well as their prosody, their kind of intonation of voice. And we find all of that matters. Surprisingly, how you look and your status actually matters far more in these initial encounters. So even our notion of relating has to do with some precursor, or staging elements of our, of an encounter. How you look and what appearances or qualities you have as opposed to the interaction itself. Although, I mean, I do think that there is something about interpersonal interaction, that they way we intonate, whether we're excited or whether we're bored, whether we go down-pitch, we're not very happy, as opposed to up-pitch. Things like that convey kinds of emotional, relating kinds of information. Now, it's interesting that technology devices are actually getting better, though. Skype is quite a thing. The fact that I can get better at my recording of screen side chats and show a little more emotion, same thing with the lectures, over time you improve at it. And I think the same thing with these kind of technologies. They're getting better, as well. A more interesting kind of thing to ponder, though, is how these social media and iPhones and the like, how that's, and e-mail, is changing how we relate in person, even in the face to face. So you'll go to meetings, everyone's on their laptop. Or you're on the train, like someone said, everybody's on their phone. Do we listen as well and pay attention to the current moment before us? Can you finish a book anymore? Whereas now it's an e-mail or a paragraph, right? As opposed to a paper. So I think there is an implication for all this distributed cognition and short moments of relating. I mean, you can decide when you turn on your phone as you walk out that's your checking in with, walking out of a meeting, that your checking in with people you care about. So you're deciding who you want to relate to on your own terms. And it's asynchronous types of interaction, as opposed to face to face is kind of synchronous. You have to adjust to each other in the moment. And I think our capacities for that may be a little more challenged in order to kind of pay attention and to negotiate those situations. I mean, a lot of you guys probably have texted your partner, or your friends, in another room, even, or prefer text over telephone calls, as a more efficient means of communication. So I think with efficiency, this moral, this interpersonal relating as a strong a tie, as a friendship is kind of different, right? But it may be that the mediated, or this technological kind of communication, is more efficient in many regards. And that's kind of what's happening, perhaps. On the other hand [LAUGH] some people aren't very good in person. So this kind of technology and the means of communicating online may actually be a means by which they can communicate better. And a lot of you, myself perhaps included, is better in writing than perhaps interpersonally at times. So there is something about that medium of communication that might be beneficial to some. I do think, overall, that proximity as a form of a basis of relating may be diminishing some. I think it will always be an important one, but I think in terms of work environments, its clear that we're using a far more wider array of asynchronous technological devices of communication, and that's kind of growing. And I think there's clear implications for our attention spans and how we relate to each other interpersonally when we actually get the chance to do so. The second question, or the third question I wanted to address, was by Victoria Zoler. And she asked when will the majority of employees work from home? So I think this is a related question. And it's about kind of like why not work at home if you can do most of it there as opposed to the workplace and face to face? Do you need that for relating and network formation and kind of building a community? I think one of the questions that kind of comes to mind is do you need to be at work five days in the office, and what's the right balance? I mean, at some point, someone mentioned 90% at home or 40% at home, I mean, there are certain issues there in terms of loss of connection with your employees and your colleagues, as opposed to a sense of balance in your work life. And I'm not sure what the answers are there. It's clear that this distributed technologies and working from home saves money in some regard, that people don't have to drive into work, that if they can do quite a bit from home at the same level of efficiency, then that's that great. You use less office space even, and the like. I think the answer by Craig, Ken, and Michael is also helpful. And they talked about it's going to depend on the kind of industry, the kind of work being done. And so, you can think of a kind of industry where you need to be co-present like construction, or nursing. In a hospital, you have to be physically present to maintain the ethics and the actual accomplishment of those tasks. Whereas other things like what I do, or what you are doing on this course, we don't necessarily need to be co-present. We could be, and that would be probably a lot better and more effective. But I think that it's feasible that with highly skilled and more kind of knowledge based tasks, that maybe co-presence isn't always necessary and perhaps at a lower rate. So, depending on the industry and the kind of work being done, I think Ken, Craig and Michael have a point there. Now, Shirley, of course, always has some great insights, and I think in one of her posts she also distinguishes as to what the benefits and the costs of working from home are. And the benefits are control, and you control your time and oversight is less. There's trust, things like that that you gain, as well as kind of a sense of balance perhaps. There is the saying with absence the heart grows fonder. A little bit of absence might not hurt. Of course, there's the opposite saying which is out of sight, out of mind. Which, so a balance between these two is hard to find, and I think thinking about your particular industry would help. But there are also issues at working at home. I mean, it's easy to be distracted. It's easy to find other things to do. And you find, like in my case, I work when I get home, too. And the two kind of blend together. So, it's difficult to tell where one begins and ends. So there's this kind of issues of zoning and self-discipline, self management that if you work from home. And I think Shirley does a nice job of highlighting that. But in general, these two questions concern how relating differs because of technological devices where the capacity to work at home and what these implications are. And whether they're suited to the particular industries we're involved in. And I think it's, they're great questions to ask, and there's far more we could say. But hopefully we've covered a little bit of ground, and delving deeper into them.
