Why fly when you can ‘fly’?

VWW is regularly asked to assess academic funding proposals (not all of them concerning virtual worlds). Today, VWW has marked several, and noted yet again academics requesting large (four or five digit) amounts of money for, essentially, travelling to events.

One of the questions in the ongoing survey for snapshot #9 concerns the advantages and disadvantages of ‘real world’ travel against using online methods of hooking up with people, be it for a conference, workshop, presentation, meeting, or some other event.

Flight delays

With a summer of strikes threatened on British Airways, the reasons against flying off somewhere are stacking up. Volcanic eruptions can cause massive hassle, leaving people stranded for days or weeks with little or no warning; are these pictures what you have in mind regarding the luxury of travel? A myriad of other possibilities and regular events, from air traffic controller strikes to technical problems can add time, extra expense and stress to your journey. Even if all goes well, can the costs always be justified, as they include:

• Plane, train, taxi, ferry and car costs.
• Insurance and medical costs.
• Increased costs of subsistence e.g. food, extra clothing for a different climate.
• Hotel bills.
• Event organisation costs.
• Academic wages; each day the academic is away at an event, or travelling to/from it, but still being paid.

These costs are often, individually, significant (as anyone who has to take a train at short notice will know). In total, even for a small event in the same country that all the participants reside in, the costs can run into thousands of pounds. And this against a backdrop of massive cuts being increasingly inevitable.

Train delays

Can technologies such as virtual worlds, Elluminate or Skype, significantly replace real world travel, in terms of finance and time? Possibly, maybe, though there are issues:

• Facing a screen is not the same as facing people. Even with video, body language and other nuances are missed. The opportunity to ask questions, start debates, is restricted by the technology between you and the other person, or people.
• Social interaction and opportunities are limited. Sit next to someone at an event and you can strike up a conversation, go down the pub with them, swap notes. Serendipitous contacts take place which are less likely when at a virtual event. Though a counter-argument to this is ‘Why wait for the event?’, with academics who make good use of social media such as Twitter regularly coming across new and relevant contacts and information.
• Meeting people is, for some academics, easy. Whereas e.g. handling an avatar in a virtual world is, for them, difficult; it requires training, screen time, and a lot of frustration. But, on the other hand, not everyone who goes to academic events is outgoing and social. You can usually spot people sitting quietly on their own, writing their own notes, then going home without speaking to anyone. Is this always an efficient use of time and money? Would they have made more contacts, obtained more information, through using more comfortable methods of attendee communication?
• If academics never ‘escaped’ from their offices, then their ‘quality of working life’ is arguably lessened. Though, perhaps, it should be noted that many other sectors, and jobs, involve being in front of a screen every day, with little or no opportunity to ‘escape’.

Telephone conference call

Which brings us on to another reason why travelling to events continues to be popular, possibly the largest reason. Some academics simply don’t want to give up the travel. And can you blame them? Given the choice, if someone else is going to pay for your trip to e.g. San Francisco, where you can combine work and pleasure, then many people aren’t going to say “Erm, no, I’ll just sit in my cubicle office and do it online instead.”

Video conferencing is not new; the JISC Ariadne project consisted of two teams, one in Bath and the other in Dundee. In 1996 – 14 years ago – we used video conferencing to hold a meeting. It worked – surprisingly well. A few hours out of the office, then back to work. Total cost; a few hundred pounds, as opposed to many times more if people had been flown, or sent on a train, then put up in a hotel, between south west England and central Scotland. So it worked – 14 years ago (worth stressing), so the technology should be considerably better by now, surely? Even the new iPhone has video conferencing (though, of course, not everyone will get – or wants to get – such a device). So why is video conferencing still so infrequently used in academia, compared to events – of all kind – that require travel and significant cost?

This issue could be posed as a set of questions:

• Are the extra benefits (and what are these?) of travelling and meeting up in person worth the extra cost, as opposed to holding the event online?
• What actually are those benefits?
• Some people handle digital communications ‘better’ than others, but some people handle social interaction at events ‘better’ than others. But what is ‘better’ and can it actually be costed?
• Even with digital communications there is no consensus. Some people get a lot out of using a virtual world at events; others become frustrated and prefer video conferencing or various chat systems. Personal and practical preferences run strong.
• If, in an extreme circumstance, all non-essential travel was banned in UK Education and all communications were undertaken digitally, how would this affect the quality of research, and what would be the true costs and savings?

Oh, and as a side-point: aren’t we supposed to be saving the planet, reducing emissions et al? Another argument, perhaps, for making video conferencing and other technologies more mandatory in academia?

Comments and thoughts are welcome – without this turning into a “Technology X is wonderful, but technology Y is crap” slangfest.