An itinerant scholar in the Age of the Internet

As you probably noticed...

... I've been traveling a bit--hence the slightly erratic SRS posts over the past month. This will probably continue for a bit more time as I keep moving around the planet.

Taveuni, Fiji

Both the springtime and the end of the year tend to be a busy time for me. In the last 3 months of 2017, I will have visited Taveuni, Fiji; San Diego, CA; Washington DC; Pensacola, FL; Chapel Hill, NC; Knoxville, TN; College Park, MD; Cairns, QLD; Brisbane, QLD; Poughkeepsie, NY; and New York City, NY.

Pensacola, FL

This is what comes from being an itinerant scholar. Even now, in the Age of the Internet and high bandwidth connections with live streaming 360-degree video, there's still an ineluctable value in actually being present.

Why is that? Couldn't I just phone (or video) it in?

Knoxville, TN

As my friends Judy and Gary Olson wrote in 2000 paper, Distance Matters. One of the more surprising findings from their studies is that people behave differently when they THINK you're far away. It's a kind of unconscious bias: if I believe you're far away, then I tend to trust what you say less. This is makes no rational sense, but it's been studied many times.

What's more, when I visit you in your workplace (or university), we have the chance to have lots of informal, high-touch (notice I didn't say "high-bandwidth") interactions. I've been in a lot of high quality videoconferences, but the quality of physical presence (with all of the nuances that seem to get lost over video) is powerful.

UCSD, La Jolla, CA

What's more, when I visit you, we can have informal side discussions that are incredibly valuable. When you're on a video call, the conversation is framed within the time of discussion--everything before and after (which turns out to be incredibly valuable) doesn't happen.

Even though physically traveling to another venue is kind of a hassle--it's almost always worth it. (Especially when that venue includes scuba diving, which doesn't work well over video...)

Besides, when I travel, I pick up all kinds of ideas for SRS Challenges. You'll be seeing a few during the next year!

Me playing chess with statue. Georgetown, DC.
I think I'm winning.

In other news, I'm also trying to finish up my book. I'm realizing just how much time writing a book takes. Even if you've got over one thousand blog posts to draw from, editing some of them into a reasonable book takes a huge amount of sitting-and-typing.

Thanks for hanging in there with me as I travel hither and yon. It'll all be worth it!

Still searching!

Reference: Olson, Gary M., and Judith S. Olson. "Distance matters." Human-computer interaction 15.2 (2000): 139-178.