Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [20]
A second fallacy sometimes put forward by skeptics of online collaboration is that it’s always possible to replace online collaborations by equivalent offline collaborations. For example, they might argue that given enough patience and a room full of mathematicians, you could do an offline “simulation” of the Polymath Project. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that, as a practical matter, it’s far easier to get together online than offline. So the objection is a little like saying that the invention of the automobile or passenger train changed nothing about travel, because people had always been able in principle to use a horse and buggy to travel long distances. The observation is true, but has little practical importance for how people actually behave. The second problem is that human behavior in a room full of mathematicians would in practice be dramatically different than in the Polymath Project. To pick one of many examples of differences: offline, if someone speaks with you when you’re tired and cranky, you may not understand what they said; online, you can read and reread at your leisure, when you’re alert and enthused. Because of these and many other differences, you can only do the offline simulation if you make unrealistic assumptions about how humans would behave in the room. This is not to say a room full of mathematicians couldn’t collaborate to do remarkable work. But it wouldn’t be using a Polymath-style process, it would be using a different architecture of attention. Online tools really do enable us to collaborate in new ways.
With those two fallacies out of the way, what of the ways in which offline conversation is genuinely superior to online collaboration? One especially stands out: the rich nature of face-to-face contact. Body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and regular informal contact are all tremendously important to effective collaboration, and cannot be replaced. With people you like, in-person conversation is enjoyable and stimulating, and online collaboration loses something by contrast. Of course, this loss is gradually being offset by more expressive collaborative technologies—a tool such as Skype video chat is remarkably effective as a way to collaborate. Over the longer run ideas such as virtual worlds and augmented reality may even make online contact better than face-to-face contact. Still, today the online experience of direct person-to-person collaboration lacks much of the richness of offline collaboration. It’s tempting to conclude that online collaboration can’t be as good as offline.
The trouble with this conclusion is that it ignores the problem of how you find the right person to work with in the first place. This is perhaps because finding that right person has historically been such a hard problem that we usually don’t bother. Offline, it can take months to track down a new collaborator with expertise that complements your own in just the right way. But that changes when you can ask a question in an online forum and get a response ten minutes later from one of the world’s leading experts on the topic you asked about. In creative problem solving, it’s often better to have a terse twenty-minute text-only interaction with an expert who can solve your problem with ease, rather than weeks of enjoyable face-to-face discussion with someone whose knowledge is not much different than your own. And, in any case, you don’t have to make this choice. In practice, you can use relatively impersonal tools to find the right person or people for the problem at hand, and more expressive tools such as video chat, virtual