TVA Rural Studies

Telecommunications Technology and American Rural Development in the 21st Century

Edward J. Malecki
Department of Geography
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-7315
July 1996

7. The Telecommunications-Travel Tradeoff

Perhaps the greatest controversy of telecommunications technology is the degree to which it enables firms and people to eliminate travel and face-to-face meetings, and to interact instead electronically. Skeptics contend that even as videoconferencing catches on, "the consequence will be more business travel than ever. . . If electronic meetings could deliver the subtlety and richness of a face-to-face encounter, maybe we really could substitute screens for airplanes. . . Travel substitution is a phantom" (Saffo 1993: 112-116). Firms select

from a growing menu of communications and transportation choices. For a global team, voice telephony is perfect for spontaneous two-person conversations, E-mail and fax work well for swapping text and documents, voice mail is a good antidote to time-zone differences, and videoconferencing is just the thing for weekly meetings. These technologies do not replace face-to-face gatherings, but allow team members to keep contact and coordination hot' between the inevitable trips to one another's locations (Saffo 1993: 117).

Reinforcing this view, Thorngren (1977) found that face-to-face contacts tend to create new telephone contacts, but the reverse is not true. Claims that telecommunications substitute for transportation "simply ignore the synergetic effects of improved communications on the need for face-to-face contacts that, for institutional or cultural reasons, cannot be handled on-line. The point is that better telecommunications services are likely to both encourage substitution away from transportation and induce new transportation demands" (Nicol 1985: 105). Recent research on 55 multinational corporations found that high and growing levels of telephone, fax, and e-mail communication did not decrease the need for travel and face-to-face meetings, which are seen as the only way to develop and maintain trust (Wooldridge 1995).

Electronic communication, such as in team design work integrating international R&D, is likely to be effective only if a level of confidence has been built previously through personal face-to-face contact (De Meyer 1993). Moreover,

even with the best electronic communication systems, confidence between team members of a project team spread out over the globe seems to decay, even if they have real time contacts through electronic mail . . . computer conferences, videoconferencing systems and the telephone. Confidence between engineers has perhaps, like nuclear radiation, a half-life time. Thus regular face-to-face contact seems still necessary, to boost that confidence to a level high enough to have effective team work (De Meyer 1993: 116).

The purpose of external contacts conducted face-to-face include giving and receiving advice, exchanging information, negotiations, and general discussion. By contrast, routine giving and receiving of orders and of information is more likely to be conducted by telephone. Thus, the relocation away from cities is most likely for routine office work (back offices), whose workers have few external contacts. Face-to-face interaction is essential for knowledge activities, in order to build and reinforce trust. Personal contacts are the medium in which communication takes place between organizations (H'kansson 1987). Personal contact also is needed for the transfer of "sticky information" in activities such as new-product development, which often requires several trips for the exchange of context-specific information (von Hippel 1994). For communication of more routine information, such as various clothing designs, electronic means are adequate and provide significant savings over travel (Keen and Cummins 1994).

Rather than to attempt simply to substitute one for another, firms effectively utilize different means of communication for different purposes (Thorngren 1970). Business and contacts by telephone are important means of communication to establish confidence and make it possible to solve problems in a short time. Electronic mail and fax are needed when the receiver is hard to reach, as when there are time differences. Electronic data interchange (EDI) makes it easier to perform routine orders, and mail and delivery services are still needed for larger deliveries (Lorentzon 1993). The issue of substitution is rendered meaningless by the vast number of transactions directly between communicating computers. Without telecommunications, "such interactions clearly could not exist. They neither substitute for nor complement existing forms of communication but are an entirely new form of communication with profound implications for geographical relationships" (Gillespie and Williams 1988: 1318). The demand for this variety of forms of communications and the related variety of telecommunications technologies also works against remote areas that are not able to acquire each new technology as it comes into existence.

Jump to Section:
Contents, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, (7), 8, 9, 10, Table 1, References

Back to the 1996 Rural Telecommunications Workshop Homepage