[dansitu]

I couldn't agree more. Having grown up on IRC, forums, and eventually voice chat, I have no problem with "forging meaningful relationships" while working together in a text-based online world.

That said, I think it's a challenge for people who didn't exist in that space from a young age and figure out the patterns that make it manageable.

The sad thing is that these are probably easy things to learn, but there's no real movement to try and teach them. Instead, we try to replace our amazing battle-tested text-based tools with crappy multimedia substitutes.

It's definitely good to jump on a call sometimes, but I'd much rather have an in-depth technical discussion via writing. History is full of brilliant written correspondence between legendary figures in art, science, engineering, and business—but somehow we've decided that letters are not good enough for us.

The exception that proves the rule is Amazon, who apparently require written content to be submitted and read prior to in-person meetings in order to improve the discussion.