Eric Schwitzgebel writes: “Comparing online conferences now with what online conferences could become is like looking at Usenet in the 1980s and thinking that nothing much more could become of the internet. Just as few people in the 1980s could have imagined Facebook, Uber, and YouTube, few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish. So far, there’s no real equivalent to running across friends in the hallway and escaping for a coffee down the block. But other tools encourage one-on-one and small-group encounters in online conference applications.”