Scholars have studied virtuality in teams and organizations for over two decades. The term virtual is often used loosely and imprecisely, and theoretical debates have flourished over what differentiates virtual from non-virtual teams. In these debates, scholarship has not explicitly considered the significant ways in which the technological landscape has changed over this time. While the virtual is often treated as a separate space from real, physical or face-to-face interaction, the increasing technological saturation of our lives has resulted in a blurring of online and offline worlds such that these distinctions may no longer hold up. This talk will discuss whether the term virtuality still has currency and the ways in which we must rethink our underlying assumptions about virtuality in a digital media age.

Jennifer Gibbs (Ph.D, Annenberg School of Communication at USC, 2002) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on collaboration in global teams and other distributed work arrangements, as well as the affordances of new technologies such as social media for strategic communication practices. Her current projects include studies of: 1) social media and organizational knowledge sharing, 2) global virtual team collaboration, 3) social support and normative control in online communities, and 4) distraction and the role of new technologies.