Mesh08: “Does Location Matter?” Bill Buxton on Telepresence

One of the most challenging aspects of online communication is the replication of physical experience. While there are clear benefits to email, IM and Twitter etc., there is obviously a lot lost in electronic communication, whether body language or physical context, and the issue of how to ‘make oneself present’ in something like videoconferencing is both complex and difficult. This was the topic of the Mesh talk “Does Location Matter”, featuring Nora Young, host of CBC’s podcast Spark and Microsoft’s Principle Researcher, Bill Buxton. (I’ve linked to a video of the full thing at the bottom of this post).

Buxton, also an academic from the University of Toronto, argues that technology both cannot and should not replace face-to-face interaction. What must be improved as we move forward, however, is the recreation of the physical and social contexts that define communication. As an example, Buxton points to personal space. During physical communication, there is a social protocol that roughly determines the acceptable proximity of one speaker to another. If during a teleconference, the image of one party is captured with the camera only a foot or so from their face, then the technology has not lived up to the cultural mores it should work within.

As such, for Buxton, tech has to function as a proxy for identity and its context, creating a digital projection not only of the self but also as much of the social and physical context as is possible. And because this context is so difficult to convey across video, Buxton says that the relation of communication and context must be inverted in online connections such that the context is foregrounded and the communication made the ‘unnoticed’ background. An example of this might be additional monitors in a videoconference to convey the layout of a room or the physical distance between the various members there.

What wasn’t raised as much as I would have liked was the actual titular question of ‘location’. It would have also been interesting to hear some discussion of the relationship between one’s physical location and one’s identity. I, for example, still identify very much as a Torontonian, particularly when I am not here. How will this start to change as, for example, group identification starts to shift in relation to a virtual community, or the what is defined as the public sphere moves to the online world?

What was raised, however, was how things might differ in regards to media when the need to appeal to population centres potentially diffuses. After all, something like the Toronto-centric nature of Canadian media or the New York-centric approach of its American counterpart is very dependent upon not only physical location determining some sense of common interests, but also the economics of scarcity that dominate ‘old media’. And is new media taking advantage of the long tail effect when it continues to pitch TV shows with high production values and, consequently, a high cost of entry to the interests of its major population centres?

The emphasis of the talk, however, was ultimately the question of translation: of how one conveys the physical through the digital. Buxton’s provisional answer is to think of technology as a social prosthesis, an artificial replication that roughly approximates the function of the thing it copies. It’s an approach that could have a number of beneficial implications for how we interact with each other and technology itself.

Does Location Matter? from CBC Radio: Spark on Vimeo.