Gizmodo scooped a rare, public in-person meeting between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt.

Last week, I was shocked to read Gizmodo’s scoop that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were spotted in person at a café in Palo Alto. As arguably two of the most ‘jacked in’ people in the world, I was intrigued that they would prefer to meet face-to-face for a conversation that could very well take place over GoogleTalk or iChat.

A couple days ago, I attended a Boston Ad Club event with foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, during which Xconomy’s Wade Roush interviewed him on the start-up’s meteoric growth and the rise of location-based social networking. Again, I was somewhat surprised that this type of interview — of a tech CEO by a tech writer — was conducted primarily, if not solely, in person.

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley is interviewed by Xconomy's Wade Roush on the rise of location-based social networking at a recent Boston Ad Club event (photo taken on my Blackberry).

As someone who currently works in the brand experience space, I’ve heard both my colleagues and others report that, with budget cuts and public scrutiny, many companies are committing their events budgets to the virtual world.

For some reason, though, there seems to be an intuitive, primitive inclination to have our most important meetings in-person — to see who we’re speaking to face-to-face. Why is that?

The Scientific Point-of-View on Face-to-Face Interaction

Of the innate desire for face-to-face social interactions, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande notes the ground-breaking research of Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with baby rhesus monkeys.

In the mid-1950s, Harlow began breeding his own monkeys to save money on experimental research. Raised in nurseries under conditions similar to human infants in contemporary hospitals, Harlow gave the monkeys food, warm blankets and toys, but isolated them from others to prevent the spread of infection. While physically healthy and, in fact, larger than their counterparts in the wild, the lab-bred monkeys were more than a bit off-kilter. They were prone to staring blankly ahead, rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively and mutilating themselves.

Wondering what was off with the rhesus (not to be mistaken with Reese’s) monkeys, Harlow and his graduate students tinkered with variables like diet, light exposure, and antibiotics. Then, one of Harlow’s researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their blankets, and Harlow contemplated whether the strange behavior was due to isolation from their mothers. So, he tried giving them artificial ones, and — long story, short — the baby monkeys became deeply attached to the most life-like of the fake mamma monkeys, though remained psychologically abnormal.

Harlow’s later studies that examined the effect of total isolation from birth found that released test monkeys

“…usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by… autistic self-clutching and rocking…One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

Such monkeys were permanently withdrawn, social outcasts in monkey society,  and were victims of regular attack by wild monkeys.

Gawande further notes studies among neglected and orphaned children who sustained similarly deep and sustained damage. Results among adults — particularly, prison inmates and long-distance solo sailors — also seem to indicate a predisposition to long for in-person social interaction. It is no wonder, then, that astronauts are screened for their tolerance of long periods of isolation, though they have radio and video communication for social contact.

The Business Rationale of Face-to-Face Meetings

In his white paper “Why Face-to-Face Business Meetings Matter”, Prof. Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore Business School describes why ‘computer-mediated processes’ simply don’t cut it for some types of communications:

“Group processes and outcomes that require coordination, consensus, timing, persuasion of others, etc. are less effectively accomplished using computer mediated communication modalities. Indeed, according to Straus and McGrath, the type of communication medium is likely to affect outcomes “when there is a need for the expression of emotions, when tasks require coordination and timing among members’ activities, when one is attempting to persuade others, or with task require consensus on issues that are affected by attitudes or values of the group members.” (Straus and McGrath, p. 163).”

More interestingly, Arvey explicates the advantages of face-to-face meetings:

“Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and non-verbal behavioral styles not captured in most computer mediated communication devises. There are nuances associated with hand gestures, voice quality and volume, facial expressions, and so forth that are simply not captured in email discussion, chat rooms, and the like. Even videoconferencing does not capture all of the dynamics of group members (e.g. the expression of others while one member is talking, etc.).”

Interestingly, Gizmodo applied analyses of these type of behavioral attributes to Jobs’ and Schmidt’s recent meeting (provided by Janine Driver, who has taught CIA and Scotland Yard members how to read body language).

Beyond body language, face-to-face meetings are important, Arvey avers, because

“…business meetings allow participants opportunities to develop important exchange relationships among themselves. These exchanges can be in the form of business negotiations, personal favors, promises, understandings, etc. that cannot often be achieved via other forms of communication because of their personal and informal nature. One psychological theory that emphasizes this notion is “social exchange theory” where human relations are viewed as an exchange of rewards
among individuals or achieving equity between “what you put in” compared to “what you get out” of relationships.”

Most salespersons will agree: face-to-face sales meetings, while costly and time-intensive, typically have the best results.

…..

To end, I’ll provide this brief excerpt from Atul Gawande’s beautifully written article in The New Yorker:

“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Please feel free to leave your questions, comments and concerns below!

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An image pulled from DeviantArt by CrapsY (username).

The first was with an old friend, Michael P. (whose facebook profile I took the below quotation from), who forsook the life of  a Harvard-graduated consultant to work in a coffee shop and live as a Central Square hipster. Our conversation, which ranged from ‘catching up’ to ‘big issues,’ gravitated toward Michael’s thoughts on an emergent counterculture that he termed ‘the unplugged’ — that is, those who refuse to subscribe to a lifestyle that increasingly depends on modern technology. A proponent of this lifestyle, Michael made significant efforts in the last couple years to reduce his online footprint, pare down his digital interactions, and do things like increase the size of his record collection and work on a screenplay about an 80’s record producer.

As I understood them, Michael’s views (and those of ‘the unplugged’) are premised on the notion that technology detracts from our lives’ experiences by drawing our attention away from our real-world experiences and interactions. Michael posits that those who are ‘plugged in’ misguidedly reify technological advances as ‘progress.’ While technological artifacts seemingly make our lives better, they actually distance us from one another and definitively human activities — e.g., expressing ourselves through art and engaging the world through our tactile senses (sound familiar?).

The ‘unplugged’ view, I think, tends to overly romanticize the past and a (purportedly) simpler way of socializing, expressing oneself, and interacting with the world. Though I understand the love for and actually tend to prefer activities that more intimately (in a physical sense) connect me to the product of my work, I (and, I think, many others) view technological artifacts as just another set of tools we can use to interact with the world — e.g., a paintbrush, a pencil, a pair of glasses. In other words, technological advances most directly affect media, not expression. Or, more simply, technological advances most directly affect the tools we use, not how we use them.

That said, the forms of expression undeniably change as a result of the given media through which they are expressed. The notion of ‘friendship,’ for instance, has changed dramatically. In a world where roughly 30 percent of the facebook friendships of those between 18 and 24 are people whom they have never actually met, ‘friendship,’ it seems, certainly means something less substantial than what it perhaps once did. For photographers, the development of Adobe’s Creative Suite has changed how they view their craft.

In this light, I think the dichotomy between ‘unplugged’ and ‘plugged in’ is misguided. The analogy implies a reliance upon a sort of technological energy for functionality. But technology is more than that–at least for me. It enriches, enhances and augments my reality; it creates opportunities to share information, connect with others and learn about things I never would have been able to otherwise. In many ways, my subscription to a life filled with technological artifacts is more akin to the Matrix’s ‘jacking in’ — that is, it’s a choice to participate in a whole other experience of reality (I recognize the negative implications that this term may hold. My use of this term is also an admission that there is certainly something lost in exchanging the simplicity of more immediate physical interactions with the world for a view shaped by a world in which technological advances are a given). In contrast, a life without technology, I think, is a rejection of participation in this world and its benefits — and so, I will term it ‘checking out.’

This distinction leads me to think of the second conversation I had on this subject. During my final interview presentation with Jack Morton Worldwide, where I now work in business development, Liz Bigham, the Director of Brand Marketing, asked me if I perceived a pull-back reaction to a world saturated with social media — a desire for real, physical connections with other people. During the interview, my first response was that the nature of interactions is being transformed by media and the capabilities of technology. That is, the line between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences would continue to erode as time progressed, and any desire for ‘physical’ experiences could eventually be entirely satisfied by virtual ones.

But thinking back on this question, I’m not certain this is the case. I anticipate that the ideological divide between ‘jacked in’ and ‘checked out’ peoples will only increase as technologies transform our experiences of reality more dramatically. Michael’s disdain for technology isn’t fading quickly, and there’s something intuitively appealing about his rejection of the ‘jacked in’ life that evokes sympathy. Don’t I also enjoy it when I get out to nature, leave behind my cell phone and computer, and cut myself off from the technological world? But my memory of the practicality of using technology always seems to win out. I like having a world of information at my fingertips, the people I know available at the touch of a button, and the host of possibilities technology provides me. I suppose, though, that’s the divide–some people don’t.

But perhaps there is something to my initial intuition in my conversation with Liz, and the ‘checked out’ counterculture will ultimately have less ammunition to fuel its ideology. At the core of disdain for technology, I think, is disdain for ‘the complex,‘ a purportedly enhanced reality in which our actions must conform to the constraints placed upon them by the limitations of technology. What this disdain fails to recognize is that accompanying the trend of technological complexity is an ever-increasing tendency toward simplicity in design. User interfaces are becoming more elegant and intuitive, despite increasingly complex back-ends. Physically, technological artifacts — e.g., televisions — are also becoming less cumbersome and streamlined. This tendency toward design simplicity will only become more apparent as  futures waves of technological artifacts reach us.

My guess: ‘checked out’ people will resist until Apple comes out with a strong enough ad campaign for its iTablet.

“As I look around the contemporary American scene I am puzzled by what seems generally to pass for a historical object or monument…With us the association seems to be not with our politically historical past…what we cherish are mementos of a bygone daily existence without a definite date. Archie Bunker’s armchair will recall–at least to the present generation–not only the many hours agreeably spent watching television, but also the environment, the setting, of a popular program, though not necessarily the program itself.”
- J. B. Jackson

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