Why drag yourself out to a bar when you can sit all by yourself at your desk blogging with a Scotch in hand?

Robert Scoble has predicted the death of big conferences. Now, I like Robert and agree with most of what he says, but I have to take issue with this one. In his post, he points out that he told 15 people at a small blogger conference about his departure from Microsoft. Some of those folks blogged the news, leading to somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million impressions. Says Robert:

So, why does anyone need to go to a big conference to hear the news again? Simple: you don???t. It???s not worth doing. Not when a CEO can write a blog, get more people to visit it in 36 hours than would probably visit his booth at the Detroit Auto Show. How do you get news out? Invite a blogger over for lunch. It doesn???t matter who the blogger is. If the news is interesting it???ll spread and spread fast.

I have no issue with Robert’s argument; it’s absolutely true. The problem is that conferences are about a whole lot more than disseminating news. I wouldn’t go to the Detroit Auto Show to hear a CEO make an announcement. I’d go to see and sit in the cars. Not a picture. Not a virtual car in Second Life. I want to see 3,000 pounds of metal, plastic, chrome and rubber. I want to sit in the front seat and wrap my hands around the steering wheel and inhale that new car smell.

I go to the IABC conference to interact with other people, both in sessions and in bars and restaurants. I know I can do that online, but there’s something a whole lot more satisfying about a face-to-face experience. That’s why so many of us (including Robert) host geek dinners when we’re traveling. There’ll be a big such dinner at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo where I’m looking forward to finally meeting people like Heidi Miller, John Wall, Terry Fallis, and a host of others (not to mention renewing friendships with people I’ve met before like C.C. Chapman and Rob Safuto).

I recall one communication conference at which the speaker urged the audience to not forsake face-to-face as a tool for communication, noting that we’re hardwired from prehistoric times to communicate that way. “Any communication that is not face-to-face,” he said, “is a corruption of face-to-face communication.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think blogs and other social media rock and Robert is absolutely right about the way news can get out in this era of social computing. But in a blog posting you lose facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and all those other non-verbal cues that drive most of our reaction to a message. That’s what the speaker meant about corruption of face-to-face communication. (Yes, a video can address a lot of that, but let’s face it, only a handful of the people with whom you’d want to interact will produce and post a video, and then it doesn’t allow for real-time engagement.)

Big conferences, then, will continue to thrive—so we can put hands on the products and services being touted there and so we can interact with real people in the physical world. Or, as Robert Bruce put it in a comment to Scoble’s blog, “Having no conferences will prevent me from having realtime conversations with people who I can???t get an email or blog response from because you are all too busy with your A, B or C lister rankings!”