Sphinx

What are conferences actually for? There were plenty of reasons for asking this question even before the pandemic, above all because of concern about the environmental impact of lots of academics merrily jetting round the world, and various people have been getting quite excited that, if nothing else, the plague might have broken us of the habit, or at least made us familiar with alternative approaches. I remain in the ‘undecided’ camp, at least as far as real-existing online conferences are concerned (I’ve participated in three in the last month).

As I reflected back in July, they don’t remotely duplicate the crucial role of networking, especially for people who don’t already know lots of people, and we probably ought to be thinking about this more – it’s enormously frustrating that there was no time at the end of my CAMWS to discuss Brooke Holmes’ amazing paper on biopolitics, and no opportunity to go for a coffee afterwards, but I’m established enough to have no fear (or at least only a moderate amount of fear) in contacting her separately, whereas for a more junior person the post-paper chat can be the perfect opportunity. In other respects, too, I am still more convinced that, rather than rushing to replicate what we used to do just in an online format, we need careful consideration of what we ought to be trying to do.

This has really been brought home by the experience of glossy online conference platforms. Zoom and Teams certainly have their issues, but at least they are familiar issues; they offer the equivalent of a room full of people, with the disadvantage of lacking the normal visual cues that help manage interaction (arrangement of furniture, facial expressions) but the potential advantage of having the chat facility, emojis, and the virtual hand – and the definite advantage that many of us are using these platforms all the time, for not dissimilar activities. The online conference platforms are…not like this.

They are not familiar (hence, at least at the moment, having to set up extra meetings for instruction and log in half an hour before the session starts, and the need for extra support staff to be on hand throughout). They don’t replicate the seminar room or the lecture theatre, because they deal with the problem of lack of visual clues leading to communication breakdown by doing away with the audience altogether – or at any rate reducing it to an entirely passive role, silenced (except, possibly, getting to write something in a Q&A forum) and invisible to the speakers (who at best see a little counter of how many people are supposedly watching). The closest thing to this in my experience was a long time ago, in the closing stages of my PhD, when I gave a guest undergraduate lecture at Royal Holloway by sitting in a room on my own with a camera being broadcast simultaneously to a lecture hall down the corridor and another somewhere in central London. And that is not a recommendation.

What this offers – indeed, mandates – is a very specific conception of what a conference paper is all about: one-way transmission of information. At best, the audience get to write something in the (moderated) chat or Q&A, which I suppose could be good for allowing thought and careful formulation rather than blurting, but seems to me more likely to be inhibiting. This is not my idea of fun… More importantly, to return to a theme I’ve considered before, why could this not just be a blog post – or a video, if seeing the speaker is important? What benefit is gained by having people receive the presentation simultaneously (even if this requires them to give up their evening to participate in a conference abroad), when their opportunity to interact with the speaker is limited to posting a short question online, and their opportunity to engage with other audience members is zero? And how much additional time and money does this absorb? Yes, there are better and worse examples of this (the Inclusive Classics session at the online Classical Association conference had a really lively discussion running in parallel to the presentations, and the social media session was able to carry on the discussion on the Twitter), but I still think we’re too wedded to trying to replicate whatever bits of past practice we can, without worrying enough about the bits that we can’t and so are simply being discarded.

Or maybe I’m just cranky because (1) I didn’t get to go to Leiden, Swansea or Cleveland (HELLO CLEVELAND!) and (2) cranky cat woke me at half two, and online conferences are not good with headaches before you even start…