I don't like to have e.g. a walking meeting for a discussion that I would like to be able to reference later. Memory is way too lossy of a format to rely on. Yet people just feel better about in-person meetings, phone calls etc. - where means of recording are usually medium, unless you literally record the audio. This is the case even in situations where the relationship is well-established, friendly and interaction repeating - so with little reason to worry about misunderstandings or personal offenses taken.
It's costly to the collective because it stifles coordination, especially if it's not just a 1-1 relationship but exchange has to include 3+ people across various media.
Is this really just because meetings make people feel better? How malleable is this preference?
Does waiting on answers make them anxious otherwise? And people just haven't learned to deal with notifications sustainably?
Or are people (unconsciously) so much into ambiguity that they prefer all parties involved to have altered memories of statements within minutes? Allows more room for political manoeuvres or reinterpretation in a way that is less costly to the individual?
Or is this purely cultural?
Am I underestimating the barrier that writing poses to many?
Who's writing about/researching this?
Yeah, agreed that your conclusion applies to the majority of interactions from a 1-off perspective.
But I observe a decent amount of cases where it would be good to have literal documentation of statements, take-aways etc. because otherwise, you'll have to have many more phone calls.
I'm especially thinking of co-working and other mutually agreed upon mid- to long-term coordination scenarios. In order to do collective world-modelling better, i.e. to find cruxes, prioritize, research, introspect, etc., it seems good to have more bandwidth AND more memory. But people routinely choose bandwidth over memory, without having considered the trade-off.
I suspect that this is an unconscious choice and often leads to quite suboptimal outcomes for groups, as they become reliant on human superconnectors and those people's memory - as a local community-builder, this is what I am. And I can't trust my memory, so I outsource most of it in ways that are legible mostly to me - as it would be too costly for me to make it such that it's legible also for others.
It is these superconnectors who have a disproportionate effect on the common knowledge and overall culture of a group. If the culture is being developed purposefully, you'd want really good documentation of it to remind, improve and onboard.
Instead, most groups seem to have to rely on leadership and oral communication to coordinate. In part this might be because the pay-off of good documentation and building a culture that uses it is so long-term, that few are currently willing to pay for it?
I am essentially wondering about the causal relationship here: are we (a) not paying for more resource-intensive coordination systems because we consciously aren't convinced of the value/possibility of it or are we (b) not convinced of the value/possibility of more resource-intensive coordination systems because we haven't actually tried all that much yet?
I suspect that we're in the scenario of "not actually having tried enough" because of a) general culture and norms around communication that discourage trying and b) only having had the necessary level of tech adoption to even make this a possibility for <20 years.
Communities of people with mostly technical backgrounds seem to fare massively better on the existence of asynchronous and formal coordination mechanisms than most other groups (e.g. GitLab's remote culture). Is this because these people are a specific kind of person? Is it because they've been trying harder/for longer? How easily transferrable is their culture? What does it take to make it more popular? Or do we believe this attempt is doomed to fail? If so, why?
And if we agree that this seems valuable to popularize, then why is it so hard to mobilize the necessary resources to make it happen more? Is it just general inertia or is there more?
I am afraid that any single individual is making your observation for any single instance but at the collective level and across time, I would be surprised if the calculus holds.