Face to Face

It is often with a laugh that I view the predictions of the past about the nature of the future that we currently inhabit. When Allegory first took off, most people thought it would be the end of the physical office, that everyone would telecommute to work from the comfort of their home while inhabiting a shared virtual space. Quite a few companies tried it, but few were able to out-compete their physical-space-inhabiting competitors, despite the drastically reduced overhead. Eventually someone got to studying that, and it turned out that the average AR telecommuting company was losing so much productivity to employee masturbation that it was worse than the costs of maintaining a real-world office.

Face-to-face meetings, even brief ones, appear to cement personal connections of trust and liking to an extent not achieved by even years of more mediated contact like phone calls or Internet text discussions / emails / chat; this appears to be true in almost every context, even ones like British inventors meeting their heroes (in a different field) just once, with large step functions in connections despite the apparent near-zero marginal information conveyed by a brief physical visit after long-term interactions & track records.

Is there something qualitatively different about personal meetings, and if so, where is it? Is it eye contact? Body language? Is it mere physical proximity and a certain inability to suspend disbelief about a technologically mediated person?