Will face-to-face consultation make a comeback?

The inexorable rise of digital engagement is undisputed.

It has been a significant feature of the last fifteen years; and the pandemic has certainly accelerated the trend. Where once we had volumes of paper sent to policymakers working nationwide or across large geographical area, they are now almost all by email. Where public meetings and deliberative events dominated the local discourse, we rely on the Council website to promote a consultation and an online survey to gather the data. Simples!

It illustrates the thesis that modern technology radically reduces the role of geography. The first with this idea was Alvin Toffler who wrote a 1970 book called Future Shock – which this author read over 40 years ago. Long before the internet he predicted the ‘decline of geography’ because greater mobility of the population meant that ‘differences between people no longer correlate closely with geographical background.’ As soon as the online revolution came, everyone agreed that it no longer mattered so much where you were…It became a consensus, and it took till 2004 before Professor Kevin Morgan wrote an influential paper on the The Exaggerated Death of Geography, and applied a correction. Part of his rebuttal was that physical proximity is necessary for many forms of knowledge exchange.

The debate has raged ever since. Except that now we are experiencing the practical application of these theories. For months we have consulted people ether through surveys or through technology-assisted direct dialogue. We know what this means. Seeing individuals on screen and trusting to the skill of a facilitator to ensure that everyone has their say. It was a novelty at first, but many people have grown weary of screen images and crave for a return of genuine people-to-people sessions. Clearly head-and-torso alone is not enough. Communication, we are told, is whole body language, and the way that people interact with others in a room – not just on screen. Instead of zoom fatigue, let us re-embrace those real people and find out their real views; so goes the argument.