Virtual vs. in Real Life: The Value of Relationship Perspective

Hello Ned,

Thank you the comment and the challenge.

In this case, I don't think it is logically correct to think of the virtual interaction as a replacement for those people who would not be able to make it to the virtual summit. Recall the example I give about me using social technology to learn about my friends in relatives in Taiwan in our discussion last week. Let me quote it here:

"... I use social technologies to learn about my friends and families in Taiwan. But due to the fact that we are geographically segregated, we can probably only meet F2F once a year. With or without social tech, we will and we can only meet once a year for about a week. In this case, if I use social tech, it will be an addition to our year F2F gathering. So the additional amount of time/attention I spend on these distant relationships through social tech would probably increase our tie strength..."

The situation is the same here. With or without the virtual event, we cannot meet these attendees, because these attendees were not able to make it if the summit if it was a in-real-life (IRL) event. That means whatever face-to-face (F2F) interaction or engagement we had PRIOR to the summit cannot be increased further by the IRL event, because there is no way that they could have make to the IRL event. By making the event virtual, they are able to come and therefore increase the attention devoted to building this relationship with us.

I think you might have misinterpreted the linguistics of the term "replacement." Just because they come to the virtual event and not the IRL event, doesn't meant they replace the IRL event with the virtual event. It is only a replacement if they could have come to either one, but choose to come to the virtual instead of the IRL event.

If they cannot come to the IRL event, then they have no other choices. So they are NOT replacing any F2F interaction with virtual interactions. Just like my friends in Taiwan, I have no choice but to only visit them more than once a year. Using social technology (or in this case attending a virtual event) enable us to engage and interact in addition to the annual F2F gathering. This is something that we couldn't have otherwise (because we have no choice due to distance, conflict, etc.), that is why it is an addition to whatever we had so far.

Now, if these attendees are people we never met, then our previous F2F engagement just happen to be zero. So essentially we are adding the less efficient virtual engagement to zero F2F engagement. So what we have is really only just the less efficient virtual engagement, which will result in a relatively weaker relationship than if we can meet F2F. But if the summit was an IRL event, then these people cannot come at all (and since now we assume that we never met before), we have zero engagement which result in no relationship at all.

So the conclusion is still consistent with my previous claim that "when we are using virtual in addition to F2F, we can building a stronger relationship." Just that in this case the F2F happens to be zero (if we don't know the attendees before). So the addition is:

     Virtual + F2F = Virtual + 0 = Virtual ---> a relatively weak relationship (compare to if you had F2F).

And it is consistent, because a weak relationship is still stronger than no relationship at all.

Finally, I think it could be interesting to include an additional category. But if I am only surveying the attendees, I don't think it adds anything that would address the question at hand. Moreover, increasing the number of choices in survey tend to lead to noisier result and lower response rate.

OK, I hope I made this clear. Thanks again for the discussion.