A Few Gentle Reflections on Conferences Both Online and Offline
Pat Norman
The University of Sydney
The very first time I attended an academic conference, I was confused about where to eat. This seems like a bit of a trivial concern, but the reason this mattered was that I am pretty bad at networking and introducing myself to strangers.
Every (in-person) conference I’ve been to since then, the same anxiety has unfolded. Who do I sit next to? Should I try to break into a conversation? Do I stick with people I know? Am I boring?
Now that I’ve written that, it sounds quite adolescent. As it happens, I usually run into someone I know or tap away on a computer. Maybe I will go over my slides. In any case, I’m not alone in having this kind of conference anxiety: the liminal space between sessions is, I suspect, tricky for many people.
Having said all that, you might now be imagining that I am shy or quiet or that I dislike people, and therefore our COVID-era Zoom conferences have suited me quite well. Not so. I am loud and I love people.
But there are these liminal spaces which Zoom eliminates, which can have both positive and negative consequences on the conference experience.
Zoom fatigue is a real problem. We all know this, but often we don’t take steps to address it even though we feel it ourselves. Even with a presentation window of around 15–20 minutes, we can still find ways to break the passive sense of sitting and staring at a screen.
One of my practices when preparing for conferences is to think about the kinds of presentations that I enjoy and imagine how I can emulate that feeling. It’s possible to be scholarly — even serious — and to still be engaging and interesting. This is particularly important when you’re presenting over Zoom.
One thing I’ve tried is getting the audience to write down experiences and thoughts that I know will become relevant to the topic of my paper. Interactivity doesn’t need to be complex, if it is stimulating. Finding ways to tie the findings in your research to the experience of your audience is a good start.
There is a major upside to online conferences: it is much easier to live-tweet a conference when you’re doing it via Zoom! Live tweeting is useful for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, at a personal level, it invites you to distill the ideas you are hearing into something concentrated and understandable. This can be quite challenging. When I tweet about a conference, I keep the following principles in mind:
- Tweets need to make sense to someone who is not in the session and hasn’t read any other tweets on the session.
- Try to avoid saying things that are obvious. Give people something new!
Secondly, live tweeting helps engage others in the conversation, particularly those who are unable to attend the conference or the session. Conferences often involve making the hard choice between interesting sessions scheduled at the same time. Live tweeting helps those who weren’t in your session to follow along.
Incidentally, another big advantage to online conferences is the ability to duck smoothly from one session to the next without having to run across a venue (or be a distracting presence in the room).
However, for all these upsides, there is a subtext that runs through the conference experience to which materiality adds that extra edge: its people.
The reason we go to conferences is to interact with other people, to learn from them, and to share our own learning. We hope to build partnerships and friendships that can inform our scholarship in the future. I’m lucky to have met new people and made new friends at the last online conference I attended, but the fact that I so eagerly anticipate meeting them in person says something about where my preferred conference experience lies.
I think the world of online conferences has made me realize that those liminal spaces, the sorts of spaces where we go to eat lunch, are exactly the kinds of spaces where we get to talk to each other. They are just as fundamental to the conference experience as sitting in a room and listening to our peers.
While I’m glad online conferences have enabled us to speak to each other across the world and to communicate with people outside of the room in a more fluid and open way, I do miss the physical experience. I look forward to sharing lunch at the next one.
