Online Collaboration Vs Face-to-Face interaction - Essay Example

Online collaborative tools like video conferencing and net meeting provide an alternative way that allows people to communicate with each other across the countries or even continents. In this essay, an effort will be made to discuss whether online collaboration can potentially replace face-to-face interaction in the organization or not. Subsequently, the essay will also try to explain the limitations of online collaboration. Social presence of media will also be discussed to show the difference between face-to-face interaction and other communication media.

By drawing upon Xeon case study, the aspect of trust will be clarified to distinguish between face-to-face interaction and online communication. The essay ends up with the conclusion of the main points and gives an opinion regarding the replacement of face-to-face interaction with online collaboration. There are many potentially important factors that lead to the replacement of face-to-face interaction with online collaboration. To begin with, the increasing globalization of business (Chidambaram and Jones, 1993), team members are located in different countries.

So it hardly depends only on face-to-face interaction. . Meanwhile, development in new technology and infrastructure also smoothens and supports the remote collaborators to communicate in different locations (Tang and Isaacs, 1992). Examples of online collaboration are video conferencing, audio conferencing, electronic meeting systems (EMS), teleconferencing, electronic mail, online chatting, calendaring system, information and knowledge repositories, newsgroups, project management system, telephone conferencing, video whiteboards (Qureshi and Zigurs, 2001).

The major benefits of online collaboration tools are saving travel costs and time. People can interact anytime and anywhere, therefore many organizations implement or plan to implement online collaboration tools and expect that it will yield benefits in tune with the investments made in these tools. Thirdly, people change their life style and the way of working. They are very much familiar with the computer systems and the computer seems to have become a part of their life. Some people are addicted to the virtual world to such an extent that they start believing it to be the real one.

This therefore leads to the notion that the virtual world has the potential to replace face-to-face interaction in real life. In my opinion, online collaboration plays an important role in today's business world and it is worth to invest in the collaborative technologies because it will eventually lead to more cooperation between different units or companies. In addition, knowledge can be shared freely which in turn would lead to creation of a pro-innovation environment thus resulting in the greatest benefits for the organization.

Even though the potential of online collaboration replacing