I don't believe that, those are very different mode of communications.
> There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
I think, this could potentially help, but we seem to be still very far from it technologically. It's still impossible to achieve realistic eye contact. Audio in calls is still tragically bad - it's actually somewhat shocking that nobody was able to figure this out yet.
> Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet.
Might work in theory, but in my experience not in practice. My company tried to organize some socializing remotely, but the attendance was dramatically lower than in the in person events.
> I don't believe that, those are very different modes of communications.
So what? Just because something is different, it doesn't mean you can't get useful benefits from it.
No, you're not going to have a random hallway meeting and conversation on on a chat platform. But the barrier to just saying hello to someone or asking them a question drops to near-zero when you have those chat platforms. Yes, it does mean you need to be more deliberate about making interactions happen, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
The "remote renaissance" is still very new. (And it started during a time that was not ideal for methodically exploring and learning a new paradigm.) It'll take many more years before people adjust and really find out how communication works best.
You've missed the point. It's wasn't that there are no benefits from it. It's that there are specific benefits from conversations that won't happen on a wiki.
This is a great example of how people can miss the point if you don't go round the houses with conversation and say something in multiple ways, so they can't misunderstand.
It's nice to be able to meet in person sometimes and going out is more fun. But it absolutely is not important for effective communication. Unless they literally have poor writing skills and/or poor reading comprehension.
Email and text (and surely Slack as well) are notorious for miscommunication as a result of missing emotion, lack of visual cues, not recognizing sarcasm/joking, etc. Dozens of studies and millions of personal experiences confirm this.
There are also several good applications for internet collaboration that simulate a rich shared 2d or 3d or video space.
Or things like GitHub issues and Wikis.
Networking, mentorship, company culture, etc. can all happen over the internet. You make it part of the company culture to use the remote collaboration tools for these things routinely.
So if it's someone's job to mentor someone else then you tell them and the other person getting mentored. That 100% can be done with a text chat. But you can also do screen shares, remote code collaboration, voice and video chats, or simply an at mention in a GitHub issue. If one or both employees cannot or will not use the tools and accomplish this mentorship then you warn them and if they continue to refuse then you fire them.