Near and far: imagining the future of TelePresence

Interactivity, the connection of a person or a group to another, remains at the heart of economic, social and political life. Education and learning also depend on interaction. Today the tools we use for interacting and as means for allocating our attention are changing. One such tool is telepresence. At its high-performance end telepresence is almost like “being there”. High bandwidth, high definition video and audio, corrected for lighting and perspective, it allows people in different cities or different continents to engage in a conversation with fidelity that is tantamount to being in the same room. This paper offers an analytical framework and a few “what-if” examples that help to imagine how telepresence might change things in the future. The paper starts with a discussion of the relationship between technological and economic change, arguing that indirect effects are often the most important. We show that communication has many different dimensions ‐ it is not just about information, but also about interpretation and relationships. The second section considers the attributes of telepresence as a tool for interactivity compared with other forms of interaction like face-to-face (F2F) conversations. Here we point out that the ability of any technology to replace F2F is not only related to its efficiency in transmitting information, but also how it affects confidence in relationships and the ability of actors to deal with uncertain or complicated information. The extent to which another form of communication can substitute for F2F depends on how effective it is in providing similar degrees of multi-level communication, ranging from verbal to physical to emotional and to “social signaling.” From this perspective the effects of new technologies are often different from how they are imagined: what they replace is not self-evident. The third section presents an analytical framework for imagining ways in which tools change the division of labor; distinguishing substitution, complementary and emergent outcomes in order to get a better sense of the opportunities for intra- and extra-systemic change and novelty. More importantly, by opening up new possibilities for long-distance relationships, new technologies may have indirect effects that include generating the need for more, but different F2F relationships. Paradoxically new technologies, by increasing the speed at which new information and products are introduced into the economy (from both near and far), create new needs for intense and complex F2F relationships. As a result a new technology, like high quality telepresence can be a complement to local activity not just a way of substituting distant factors by, for instance off-shoring what used to be a F2F process. This might apply equally to consumer relationships that involve new forms of self-service using