Humans are social animals in the sense that they thrive when being social with whoever and wherever they want to be social. I don't know about you, but I have more time to be social with the people (friends, family, neighbors, volunteer groups, etc) that I actually want to be social with when WFH. Being forced to drive to an office under the pretense of "this is how our evolutionary ancestors preferred it" is low key gross.
You can - and should - be able to disseminate engineering culture through digital means.
At almost no point in human history has that ever been true. Only in the very recent past has any notion of mobility and sufficient population density existed where one could choose who they socialized with. For all of our evolutionary history, you lived and died within your tribe.
Socializing can be done with people outside that very limited circle. Meanwhile, I can get my knowledge-sharing itch by looking up new techniques on the internet, going to conferences, etc.
Just because it doesn't involve beer or seeing each other's faces doesn't mean that it's not a real culture.
That's not to say that any particular group's culture will translate seamlessly from in-person to text/video chat, but the idea that having and sharing a culture in a text format is somehow lesser than having one in person doesn't make sense to me.
No it's like raising a baby using advice you read from books that are peer reviewed and revised over time vs. just listening to what your parents say.
I'm always startled by comments like this because it's so counter to how I understand humanity. We are social mammals. No amount of good grammar and excellent font choice can substitute for sharing the same physical space together, an act that has been core to what it means to be human literally since we first speciated.
Yeah, writing stuff down is important. But engineering culture is a culture in the real sense of the word and trying to transmit that entirely through text sounds to me like raising a baby using a six-axis robotic arm.