One conclusion of the Media Space project is that ‘video technology which primarily provides a face-to-face orientation to users, fails to support peripheral monitoring and peripheral participation, does not provide access to tools, artefacts and the users’ local environment, and introduces unanticipated asymmetries into the interaction between users, is unlikely to support even the most basic forms of organisational work’ (ibid.).

Based on their prior research on organizational group behaviour, Heath et al. stress that collaborative workplaces in general reveal generic features that are also relevant to mediated environments. In a collaborative setting, co-workers develop ‘a body of informal and tacit practices for distributing information to each other and coordinating simultaneously multiple activities. These practices allow personnel to distribute information to colleagues and to monitor each other’s activities whilst apparently engaged in a single, individual task’. (ibid: 176).