Thoughtful thread about remote vs. on-site work, and hybrid models.

I want to branch off and offer a different frame on the logic of mediated congregation — or how you build a sense of shared experience is several arrangements. https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720

In some sectors, workplaces have long been hybrid. Remote vs. on-site isn’t really a technical question. At times it’s posed as a productivity concern, but the jury will be perpetually out on that one. It’s really a question about connected-ness, culture, something ineffable.

When that question of connection becomes explicit, foregrounded, and valued, the remote vs. on-site debate isn’t quite where the action is. Indeed, zoom, open-floor plans, smart rooms, ain’t it. They are means but not *the* thing that gets it done.

We lean into technical and architectural solutions to make settings. And then we forget that the settings were *for* something, that in the first instance they were design solutions for some problem. And there were always several possible solutions.

No solution fit all contexts. How could it? Organizations have important differences in how they manage connection. A more centralized or hierarchical model does different things with the same architecture and media than a decentralized one.

But these are less comfortable questions to ask: how does your organization think about power? What are the rituals it uses to transmit information, to exercise decision making? Is it deliberation or control?

There are many ways of connection, several forms of being together and apart. They can even be mixed up, changed. Arrangements are dynamic. Subgroups can have differing arrangements that only sometimes lock together just enough to sustain cohesion. It never has to be one way.

This is why community organizers and exploitative actors can use the same tools sometimes. This is why the same “screen” can be both banned in a classroom but essential outside of one. Architectures and media are only half the story. This never destroys that.

We do things with practices, rituals, performances, interactions. We occasion and sustain connections. Sometimes these things are in service of authority, sometimes they are in service of play. The doing part is what gets left out when we talk about architecture & technology.

Imagine if higher ed, for example, tackled the question of remote vs. on-site this way. It is unlikely that the hand-wringing over the death of liberal arts education would make quite the same sense. Does learning only happen around seminar tables? How about lecture halls?

It is not remotely that settings don’t matter. But setting are heuristics for occasioning something else. Getting clear about that something else turns staging the setting(s) or practices or rituals or organizations that support such things into tractable problems.

I’ve thought a lot about this problem — how we do forms of collective life — in many ways, through several methods. It really clicked for me by studying megachurches. These organizations that were implausible 50 years ago and now visible worldwide. But they aren’t unique.

Remote vs on-site vs hybrid? To what end? With what values and politics? At what scale? How does an organization of any size support some form of collectivity? What can one domain learn from another? It’s a subtle but powerful perspective shift. And we need that.