Hi John, I'm not saying that everybody feels isolated, it's just that in literature on this topic a lot of authors say that participants to their online conferences report feelings of social isolation. My guess is that especially users who are not experienced with using the internet and forums in particular experience these problems. I certainly wasn't suggesting taking away the asynchronous text based part. I was just implying that maybe there are different kinds of communication that are suited for different purposes. Asynchronous text based communication is very well suited for elaborate discussions, but might be less convenient for social talks. I'm doing my internship with a company that organizes face-to-face conferences and as you probably know a lot of the value of these conferences lies in the networking opportunities that they present. After doing research on this topic, I don't think that these conditions can be recreated (if they can be recreated at all at this point using the internet as the medium) by only using asynchronous text based communication. So should we try to recreate these networking opportunities by using other media to enhance the social side of the experience or should we just accept that with online conferences the content is more importent then the networking? What do you think? As you said, you've participated in and organized online conferences, what are your experiences on this part?
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