On to the next session - I got here late because the session was moved, but the current paper by Michael Nentwich is about the virtualisation of research and academic exchange. He discusses first the suitability of email for academic communication. Asynchronicity, speed, the written character, and the permanence are mentioned as useful characteristics in this context.
Five functions of traditional academic seminars, workshops and conferences: they contribute to quality control, the transmission of knowledge, serving as a node in the scientific network, social management, and ideas generation. In a virtual setting, these might continue to exist: this is certainly true for quality control, but the transmission of knowledge or the placement of nodes in scientific networks might work better face-to-face. Social management could work, but not in the same way as it does in offline contexts, and the same might be true for ideas generation.