Web Worker Daily

As web workers, we’re all used to a certain amount of resistance to our way of doing business. This is understandable; new ideas take time to be accepted, and as Thomas Kuhn pointed out they sometimes don’t really take hold until the proponents of the old ideas die off. Still, it’s annoying when those who seek to define the limits of web work do so with the use questionable logic.

Case in point: an Information Week blog posting from Andrew Conry-Murray titled “Meat Space Still Matters in a Web 2.0 World.” It starts this way:

Web-based communication and collaboration tools are supposed to make physical proximity irrelevant by letting employees work together regardless of where they happen to be. But when it comes to building — and investing in — those tools, it turns out proximity is relevant as ever.

Conry-Murray then goes on to discuss experiences at Y Combinator, Foo Camp, and in venture capital investing where physical proximity has been useful to cutting-edge web companies. He concludes that “while the Web has transformed the way we work, there’s still no substitute for being there.”

Let us reduce this argument to an analogy in a form that should be familiar to anyone who has taken an introductory logic class:

Bessie is a brown cow.
Myrtle is a brown cow.
Flowers is a brown cow.
Therefore, all cows are brown.

Spot the fallacy? Good. Introducing particular instances does not, alas, prove the general proposition. Indeed, it would suffice to point to one counterexample to disprove it: the company I worked for most recently never once had more than 20% of its staff in one place, yet it demonstrated better than 100% year-over-year sales growth for its first three years of existence simply by being smart, nimble, and skilled in the use of web tools. I have no doubt that WWD readers could add many other examples (including, if you consider us a success, WWD itself) of successful companies that substitute communication and collaboration for physical proximity.

But there’s another issue here too: while we’re happy to point out that web work is a great way to go for many things, we do not claim that it will replace meat space for everything. There may somewhere be someone who said that web-based tools make physical collaboration 100% irrelevant for everyone, but I don’t believe that statement came out of WWD. You won’t be herding cattle, bandaging wounds, or assembling televisions over the web.

What you will be doing, we believe, is increasingly communicating and collaborating over the web in smart ways when it makes sense to do so. Web work doesn’t make physical proximity irrelevant, but it does reduce its importance in many cases, and gives us the tools to be productive in cases where proximity is inconvenient or impossible. While we agree with Conry-Murray that it’s important to recognize the limits of web work, we also celebrate its successes and enjoy the freedom and productivity that it gives us.