But they are substitutes that can never supplant the depth, the ability to hear what isn’t being said and opportunity to “read” people that face to face contact offers. We just need to become adept at it. And I am biased as my new book will be out in October: Face to FAce: How to REclaim he Personal Touch in a Digital World.

One techie blogger wrote that there is no such thing as sharing a “virtual beer”.

We must all be digitally adept but those who succeed in the 21st Century will be the people who can “talk to other people” according to Dr. Nathan Keyfitz, of Harvard. Whether it’s the sales call, the delicate conversation, the chance meeting —face to face communication reigns.

You are definitely right: face-time is more persuasive for the reasons you gave.

It is much easier to form accurate general impressions of a speaker in person, even if we may not be able to articulate the behaviors and techniques that led us to form them. After all, we’ve all spent a good portion of our lives gaging the truthfulness of the people with whom we interact.

In his book, “Strangers to Ourselves,” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia notes that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously. The unconscious brain handles the rest.

Our unconscious brains are gathering up thousands of subtle signals from the speakers that we observe regularly and forming general impressions such as, “He’s lying.” or “She’s arrogant.”

Body-language is often lost on-line, as is tone of voice in e-mail. Thus, we lose a lot of information about a speaker which makes it much harder to be persuaded by them.

Thanks for the post!