In a Nutshell 🥜
Hollan & Sotnetta1 challenges the trend in telecommunications research at the time (which still applies to the present to some extent, especially in VR research), that is, towards creating a system that is able to imitate the sense of "being there" (i.e., face-to-face interaction). The paper argues that by setting this as the holy grail, telecommunications research will always be at a disadvantage since being able to perfectly simulate face-to-face interaction is, by nature, impossible.
The paper suggests a different research direction: beyond being there. In other words, researchers should develop tools that people prefer to use even when they have the option of interacting in a face-to-face manner. This new research direction transforms the goal of "using new mediums to mimic face-to-face interaction" into "leveraging the strengths of new mediums to address the limitations of face-to-face interaction".
Some Thoughts ðŸ’
I really like how this paper gives various concrete examples to support their approach and explicitly writing out their hypotheses.
They also give the honest signals that they are already working on some of these examples by presenting several preliminary findings.
Hollan, J., & Stornetta, S. (1992, June). Beyond being there. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 119-125).