Institute For The Future

Substituting Telecommunications for Travel

Over the last week, as the sudden eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano disrupted air travel throughout Europe, many people and organizations fell back to the dense and multi-functional communications web that has grown up between cities and continents over the last 20 years. Cisco and other companies with a big commercial stake in a rapid expansion of videoconferencing heralded the arrival of a new paradigm in business "travel". The eco-vanguard looked at the event as a glimpse of a post-oil future without commercial aviation, and produced convincing data that the volcano is actually putting out less CO2 than the flights that it has grounded would have. Journalists waxed poetic about the virtues of "slow travel". It's an interesting alignment of perspectives, all seemingly pointing towards the same forecast - that the future holds a lot more high-quality videoconferencing than travel.  

I'm not so sure.

As I wrote in 2007, the future of presence is a lot trickier that it looks at first glance. It's not a simple equation of substituting telecommunications for travel. 

[I]f movement or travel is a means - then presence is the end... [but] the idea that presence is something that can be achieved by other methods than just physical travel isn't a new one. Over the last 50 years we've seen a simultaneous rise in both business telecommunications and travel. In fact, I don't think we appreciate that the second half of the 20th century was about two intertwined revolutions, the telecom revolution we hear about all the time but also a quieter mobility explosion...

At many times people on one side of the debate or the other have wrongly forecast that one side of this equation would overtake the other - we would see the death of cities, the death of distance, and the end of travel. But what's important here is that these things happened because of each other, not in spite of each other. This particular kind of presence, international business presence, is facilitated by a hybrid set of infrastructure and human activities - making calls and getting on planes.

Now, today, the Internet, for all its distance-diminishing potential isn't really breaking this relationship. In fact. much of what we use our network technologies for is arranging travel. If you look in your email inbox or keep a diary of mobile phone calls - a safe bet is that 75-90 percent of the messages are about arranging travel or planning meetings. 

To their credit, even the most strident voices advocating the substitution of advanced telecommunications for travel understand the limits of replacement. As the New York Times reported, "No one in the teleconferencing industry claims that virtual meetings can replace all business travel, where genuine person-to-person contact is often crucial." But that kind of restraint is actually quite rare. I routinely encounter intelligent industry people and acedemic computer scientists who assure me that we are no longer going to fly anywhere. They tell me this, ironically, at conferences we've all flown to from distant cities.

The flight ban in Europe is indeed interesting, not as a peek at a general everyday future, but rather as an indication of just how resilient our business and social networks can be during crises. My studies of the role telecommunications played in both crisis management and long-term disaster recovery in New York City after 9/11 echoed the experience of California following its 1989 and 1994 earthquakes, in which major transport outages gave birth to the first two large-scale social experiments with telecommuting. They were very successful, and opened the door for more widespread adoption of such practices in those regions and throughout the world. But it didn't mean the beginning of a straight-line evolution to 100% of the workforce doing home-based telecommuting. What it demonstrated was that, in a pinch, we have the capability to approximate presence through networks for short periods of time. Today, I would say that capability is expanded, and can work over longer periods because much richer interactions are possible. But face-to-face is still a crucial part of presence, and I suspect always will be.

Still, the need for face-to-face isn't the only fundamental factor in play. Complain as we do about long security lines and traffic congestion, we like to move. Personal mobility is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be Homo sapiens. Our species has spent the vast bulk of its brief existence - about 200,000 years - as hunter-gatherers. It wasn't until about 10,000 years ago that we settled down in any significant numbers. No videoconference is ever going to substitute for the joy of exploration, movement and discovery that's hard-coded in our brains. Until, perhaps, our brains evolve (in our life span or across generations). But that is another matter.

This to me is the central wrench in thinking that widespread use of advanced teleconferencing can be part of a mobility-reduction strategy aimed at cutting the carbon footprint of the transportation sector. Mobility never goes down for long - this is the lesson of cities that have bounced back from remarkable disasters. We need to think more creatively about how telecommunications can be combined with lower-energy forms of urban development and travel to match or exceed the high levels of mobility currently provided in many countries by automobiles and airplanes. Lots of ideas are out there - on-demand transit, simulation centers, changes in the kinds of business trips we take (fewer, longer), and changes in the way teams and business partnerships are managed over distance are all going to be part of the solution.