… a strong sense based off both research and personal experience that physical proximity matters, and that you can’t build the correct kind of strength and flexibility and trust into your relationships without actually spending significant amounts of time with one another in meatspace on a regular basis, regardless of whether that makes tactical sense given your object-level projects and goals. But I’m going to hold off on going into those in detail until people insist on hearing about them or ask questions/pose hesitations that could be answered by them.
Why does physical proximity matter?
It seems intuitively true to me, but what really is it about physical proximity that makes such a big difference?
My guesses are around ‘information bandwidth’: seeing how someone interacts in the physical world is a large channel of information, which you don’t get from online interaction. (At least, we won’t until VR becomes more sophisticated, and can do things like track and render our eye movements.)
A key part of how we do trust is the massive amount of information gained from seeing people in a wide variety of social contexts.
You can assess a person’s abilities to deal with a friend who is upset; to behave well in one on one settings, small parties, or formal events; to deal themselves with being under great stress; to correctly pick up on subtle social cues that someone could use some help / is overstepping their bounds. I’ve made assumptions about people’s reliability and trustworthiness after interactions via text/skype, yet seen them act in distinctly weird ways at social gatherings that makes others uncomfortable, and I learned I’d made false assumptions of generality.
We have a lot of heuristics based on facial expressions and socialising cues that are hard to explicate (or even notice).
Why does physical proximity matter?
It seems intuitively true to me, but what really is it about physical proximity that makes such a big difference?
My guesses are around ‘information bandwidth’: seeing how someone interacts in the physical world is a large channel of information, which you don’t get from online interaction. (At least, we won’t until VR becomes more sophisticated, and can do things like track and render our eye movements.)
A key part of how we do trust is the massive amount of information gained from seeing people in a wide variety of social contexts.
You can assess a person’s abilities to deal with a friend who is upset; to behave well in one on one settings, small parties, or formal events; to deal themselves with being under great stress; to correctly pick up on subtle social cues that someone could use some help / is overstepping their bounds. I’ve made assumptions about people’s reliability and trustworthiness after interactions via text/skype, yet seen them act in distinctly weird ways at social gatherings that makes others uncomfortable, and I learned I’d made false assumptions of generality.
We have a lot of heuristics based on facial expressions and socialising cues that are hard to explicate (or even notice).