Moving Events Online Part 1: Challenges: Why are not more events taking place online?

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Table of contents:<Introduction> <Part 1: Challenges> <Part 2: Strategies> <Part 3: Platforms>

I organised my first video lecture in 2002 when I was teaching in Glasgow and wanted students to get access to experts from London and Prague. It required a dedicated room and a technician on both ends, yet it seemed that an explosion of online teaching was just around the corner. But when I started a public lecture webinar series in 2010, online presentations were still a rarity. Now, webinars and virtual meetings are commonplace but we’re still not seeing a lot of entire events moving online. Even during the time of global lockdown and mass event cancelations, most events are simply cancelled even as teaching, meetings and music concerts move online. Why is that?

The common answer to the question of why we’re not running more online conferences goes along the lines of ‘people are social animals’ they need all the cues of face to face conversation, gestures, facial expression, etc. to communicate with each other. But I don’t think this is the case when it comes to transmitting information. Sitting in a lecture room and listening to someone does not give me any better cues than watching them on a video.

The other answer is ‘serendipity’. How about all the impromptu chats before and after sessions? Informal discussions over coffee or lunch? This is much closer to the real reason. But if this is the case, then the typical conference, tradeshow or even lecture is a really inefficient way of doing this. That’s why the Open Space Technology and later the unconference movement has tried to reinvent the event to focus away from presentations and more on interactions. But even then traditional conferences and tradeshows still predominate.

So, if the serendipity explanation only captures a part of the problem, what is the solution? I’d like to suggest that to understand why online events are not more common, we have to think about three types of affordances:

1. Affordances of the space and time in which events take place
2. Affordances of physical interactions with objects
3. Affordances of social interaction such as scripts and scenarios

Let’s look at these in more detail.

Side note on affordances

Affordances are a concept that’s leapt from ecological psychology to design to education technology discourse. The term is often used informally without much regard to the original research but I think we can benefit from a more rigorous analysis based on affordances. For my purpose here, I will think of affordances as the combination of the properties of our environment and our capabilities that allows us to interact with the world around us efficiently and without significant conscious effort.

Affordances of time and space

Events are incredibly expensive to attend and to organise. They cost us money, time, and space. Yet, we feel they are worth it. We or our employers pay large registration fees, travel and hotel costs just to go to a place and listen to people talk. Why? I argue that the primary reason is the affordances of space.

These are partly what the ‘serendipity’ argument for in-person conferences alludes to. But it is much more than just chance encounters. The whole physical configuration of an event is working to make it seem like a natural environment for interaction. Rooms are configured obviously so that it is clear where one should sit and the idea of a group of people sitting in rows and watching someone speak seems so obvious it is beneath our notice.

It is not just the rooms in which the talks are taking place. It is also the spaces connecting them and the people in them. We see corridors through which we can walk and even follow other people. Some of these people are easily visually identified as helpers who we can ask questions. We can follow other people who look like they are going to a session, we can ask them, “are you also going to X” in a socially acceptable way. We see signs that direct us and receive printed materials that we can carry with us. We can judge whether a talk is popular at a glance by looking at how many people are in the room.

Why is any of this important? Isn’t it just trivially obvious? This is important precisely because all of the things I mentioned above are so obvious. They automatically present themselves to us for interactions and in that they remove much of the mental burden of deciding what to do.

Let’s compare it with an online event. Nothing about an online event offers these natural affordances. There are no rooms, corridors, posters on walls, or helpful people in the way. All attendees have a is a link somewhere in their Inbox. This is not a problem for an individual webinar. But a whole online event is much different. Each participant is forging a lonely path to the component events and meetings. Some carefully put them on their agendas, other just trawl their emails for the links or Google the website hoping to find the right time and place. It is not the lack of sociability that gets in their way, it is the lack of affordances.

Organisers of online events often underestimate this aspect of the event and only focus on the interactions between speakers and audiences, and not how they connect together. An online event then becomes a series of webinars that may or may not feel like they belong together.

But there is even more to it than that. We also need to think of the affordances of time and space from which the virtual attendees are taking part. They are often in their office or at their home which is full of affordances suggesting very different ways of natural interaction. They are most likely sitting at a desk with a headset on. Every cue in their environment is suggesting that they should be doing other things. Going to meetings, washing the dishes, talking with colleagues or family. By moving an event online we have not only removed the social space of the event itself, we have disrupted the social space from which the participant is attending.

Yet, even this is not all. The online attendee is not alone in the space from which they are dialling in. That space is filled with other people who are interacting enabled and encouraged by its affordances. To them, the online participant presents as a person watching a screen with a headset on. It is natural to go to them and ask something if necessary. And the online attendee feels not just the social pressure but the natural inclination driven by the environment to look away and pay attention to this request. This is even worse in between ‘sessions’ of this online event. In person, this is a time to process or take advantage of the space to interact with others. But the space and time the participant is attending from (be it home or office) forces other demands on them. The interactions it affords have nothing to do with the event.

This gives us the real answers to why people pay so much money to organise and attend events. They are buying the space and time which affords them the interaction with the least amount of effort. All of this feels so natural that describing it in detail seems like a waste of time. But I would argue that it is because we haven’t thought this through, that online events have not become more popular. It also explains why the problem is not solved by something that more closely replicates space in a virtual replica like Second Life. That only models the space of the event but does nothing for the space in which the participant finds themselves.

Affordances of physical interactions: Skype vs phone

The popular video ‘Conference Calls in Real Life’ by the comedians Tripp and Tyler illustrates perfectly the mismatch between the affordances of virtual and physical interactions. Again, these are all under the surface of our notice but make the experience of the virtual event very different form a physical one. A few simple things the video illustrates are:

• in a shared space, once somebody is present, they don’t suddenly disappear
• it is immediately obvious to everybody in a space who else is in that space
• the level of voice in the shared space is consistent for all participants
• the attention of all participant in a shared space is shared
• it is obvious to all participants when the event is over
• speaking is managed only by the social conventions of taking turns without any other intervening channels
• all participants have exactly the same ability to interact with all aspects of the shared environment (opening doors, sitting in chairs, putting things on desks, reviewing paper notes)

None of these things are true of online events — even single meetings or webinars suffer from this but it is magnified for multi-session online gatherings. The above list is so trivially obvious that it would be quite difficult to compile it without the contrasting experience of online events.

We can blame some of this discrepancy on the reliability of technology but this is only a part of the problem. After all, physical spaces are not perfectly reliable themselves. External noise makes it difficult to hear, sunshine makes it hard to see, people come in late and have to leave early, participants’ attention wanders, speakers voice is not sufficiently amplified. The entire physical space could become unavailable because of double booking, lost keys, or a water leak.

But all of these physical reliability issues come with their own affordances that almost naturally present ways of dealing with them. We can tell people, let’s find another room if it’s locked or busy, we can even have a conversation right there. We can leave a sign on the door. If there’s external noise, we can pause until it goes away in a way that is obvious to everyone, and so on. Even technology issues in physical spaces like broken projectors, missing whiteboard markers, or lack of the right dongle have natural physical workarounds — we can just speak. They are all part of the affordances of physical spaces.

Issues with technology in virtual meetings are different because they are not shared by all the participants in the same way. When there is a sudden silence it is not clear whether it was because of a connection drop, accidental muting, or a natural pause. The same channel for communication such as a headset and microphone that was working an hour ago may become suddenly unavailable without any visual indication. All of these things have their own affordances but they are not shared, nor are they obviously in the environment. This means that they rely on the participant’s learned skill and appropriate mental models to work around. And in online events, these skills are always variable across the participants.

Over time, the technology is getting more and more reliable and more and more people are able to do basic troubleshooting. But its very nature means that there will always be a gap between the physical and digital affordances that we need to take into account.

One simple example that illustrates the problem is the simple matter of digital hand-raising. Most platforms offer a button with a hand that participants can push to raise their hand. But in all my years of running webinars, I have yet to see this work well. This has nothing to do with technology and all to do with affordances. The technology is trivial: push a button on the screen to indicate you’ve raised your hand. Anybody can do it provided, the button is in a place that can be easily discovered by the user.

But unlike with physical hand raising, the person raising the hand can easily forget that their hand is virtually raised. They often get the attention of the presenter, ask their question, get an answer, and yet their virtual hand is up. This means that after a while the presenter can no longer be sure that the ‘raised’ hands indicated on the interface mean a real question. In real life, a stretch is sometimes mistaken for a raised hand, but nobody keeps their hand up after they attracted the attention of the speaker. Also, the physically raised hand intrudes into the shared space, so others can draw the speaker’s attention to it. The virtual hand is easier to miss and ignore. It is also much easier to push the button without any physical or social consequence to the person doing it. And, of course, it can also be pushed by mistake.

So, as we can see, the affordances of physical interaction are another reason why many people would happily expend time and money to attend a real event, and why so many presenters prefer to present in person.

One reason that teachers like to give is that they much prefer face-to-face teaching is because they can adjust how they teach based on the facial expressions and other physical cues of the attendees. There is something to it. But in reality, most presenters are much worse at this than they think they are and they are much less able to adjust what they say than they hope. Having observed several hundred of such events (as organiser, attendee or even presenter), I would suggest that the ability to see facial expressions of participants is much less important than the other affordances I listed above. It is also one that is most easily fixed by technology and, unfortunately, the one technology providers most focus on.

We should avoid thinking of affordances as simply properties of the space. They only become affordances once we perceive them as being able to interact with them. And to make sense of affordances, we need to also think about the mental models we have to perceive them. Comparing the phone with online calling and video conferencing is instructive. Making a phone call has lost much of its physicality. We do “pick up” a handset but the “dialling” is most commonly tapping on a name. We may or may not hold it to our ear as we speak. Most importantly, the call is transmitted digitally over the network in the same way data is.

Yet, we have very physical mental models of phone calls. These are partly encoded in our vocabulary (pick up the call, dial, answer the call) and partly in image schemas (holding hand to ear to simulate — call me). Yet, none of those things are obvious physical properties of phones. They depend entirely on our mental models of what the physical object phone does and how it trasmits voice. These models include accounting for failure. ‘Hanging up accidentally’, ‘dropping out’, ‘poor connection’. These seem to be natural properties of phonecalls and while annoying, they are easily incorporated into the scripts through which we interpret what happens around us..

But even 20 years in, Skype (and its ilk) do not come with the same set of culturally shared models. Even after many years of using Skype and GoToMeeting at an organisation, these were still not perceived as easy to use as a phone. Even if the quality of the connection was often better than a phone, the social scripts around picking up a phone and calling someone are just too powerful. And while Skype, Zoom and others fail about as often as phone calls, their failures are interpreted as examples of them ‘not being as good or easy to use as phones’. There is a lot of nuance and complexity hidden here, but we must not forget that affordances always need to be considered in relation to their associated mental models.

Side note: The last 2 paragraphs would be anathema to an ecological psychologist who likes to think of affordances as directly perceivable. And they have a point. But mental models are the only way we have of thinking about affordances of machines and digital objects, so I think we do much better with them in the mix.

Social affordances: Scripts, routines and rituals

One more class of affordances that we need to take into account are social ones. Social affordances overlap with the physical affordances but they are more closely interwoven with the schemas and images that we share. These affordances are much more dependent on custom and convention, again much of it below the level of conscious awareness. Here the physical environment is only one of the participants in a complex network of social practices.

One such social affordance that has been most extensively studied by linguists and anthropologists is turn taking. We saw how the physical environment enables turn taking through offering a shared attention space. But there are many other conventions involved. Who speaks when, how a change of turn is signalled, how is turn taking regulated, and how is it repaired when the process breaks down. Many of the conventions of turn taking rely on physical space, so we have to develop new ways of managing this in a virtual environment.

We can see some of these issues with turn taking highlighted in the Tripp and Tyler video. But even in a setting where the presenter can see the faces of the participants on a large screen or a video wall, the lack of shared space may introduce subtle changes. For instance, one presenter complained that attendees don’t laugh at his jokes in the same way they do in physical classes. This is all to do with shared space. With laughter, we don’t react just to the funniness of the joke. We are also responding to the reactions of others, we’re signalling that we got the joke, and we’re giving feedback to the person telling the joke. Even if we don’t find it funny, we may smile politely to indicate acknowledgement. We laugh much less even when we watch a comedy routine alone than in the audience of a live performance. Attendees in a virtual session may find the joke just as funny as in person but they are not getting the same social signals to react outwardly.

As before, the social affordances don’t just apply to the act of participating in a session. They apply to the whole extended process involved in getting people to a conference. The very simplicity of being able to say to your colleagues or family something like “I’m going to a conference next week” or “I’m at a workshop all day that day” makes a lot of difference. Everybody knows a few things:

• You’re not available to talk or to call
• You are travelling away (possibly overnight)
• There is a cost of time and money involved
• You are the sort of person in an organisation who goes to conferences (this is not something everybody does)

It is also something your organisation understands. There are ways to build it into a calendar, there are established processes for payment and reimbursement. There is no local demand on space.

Attending an online event disrupts all of those scripts and routines. You are still present but not available in a way that we don’t have an established schema for. If somebody’s away at a conference, only the direst of emergencies will call them back. At worst, they may be required to check email or be called away to a phone call for urgent matters. The level of urgency is socially understood and naturally flows from the social configuration. But the threshold to asking somebody to perform a task who is simply sitting at their desk with a headset on is significantly lower. If attending from home, spouses or even more significantly children may be even less willing to acknowledge this.

We also have social schemas for interaction between sessions at a conference that are completely lacking when it is moved online. We have a sense of when to join a group, when to approach someone, etc. Not everybody feels the same level of comfort in these situations but they can at least fall back on established scripts. Sometimes, the rules of interaction are supported by a rule book or a charter. For instance, when organisers want to try a new approach (such as unconference) or change the culture (for instance, promote more gender equality). Session moderators also often agree with presenters on the best way of alerting them to time or taking questions. But even when these rules are in place, they are just added to existing schemas.

When we run an online event, we have to describe every single rule and procedure for interaction at a much lower level to make up for the lack of the social affordances developed for a certain time and space. What makes this even more difficult is that attendees have many fewer opportunities to observe the behaviour of others and adjust what they do. There is less opportunity for accidental learning. Something as trivial as seeing someone circling a session they want to attend on their agenda may give others ideas to do something similar. With online events, almost all of this happens away from public sight.

Financial “affordances”: How (not) to pay for an online event

I started by pointing out how expensive it is for participants to travel to a physical conference and how despite that the other affordances make it worth it. This is also helped by the associated mental models of what is valuable enough to exchange money for. And the mental model most associated with a conference or a tradeshow is that of a holiday — definitely for the people who tend to go to conferences. There is work associated with it but it’s also a break from work. For people whose attendance is covered by an institution, being able to attend events like conferences is a definite perk.

There are many people who have to pay to attend and may struggle to identify the resources which is why many events have bursaries and free spots. But usually not enough. So, physical conferences while great for building communities are also to some extent exclusionary — they’re for those on the inside and offer less opportunity to those on the outside. This is one thing that online communities are great at fixing. They allow outsiders to engage if they put in the work, or at least lurk and get a sense of what’s going on.

This is assuming that online communities are free to access. This may be a fair assumption for most text-based (and now increasingly image-based) online communities. But can this model also apply to virtual events? Which brings up to the other aspect of the financial “affordance” which is the cost of organizing a virtual event.

Our first reaction is that virtual events need no space and don’t have to serve food, so a large part of the cost disappears immediately. And that is absolutely true. The bulk of the cost of all the conferences and events I have ever organised was on room rental and food. There is also the cost of invited keynote speakers but that is usually minor when compared to the big fixed costs. In fact, most academic conferences just about break even or are even subsidized by the organizing institution. They are partly able to do this because they can harness the “free” labor of organizers and helpers (students), and can usually rely on some local institutional support.

But there is another class of event, usually put on by an association or some type of professional body for whom the annual event is a significant source of revenue — sometimes the main annual source of income. They often have much less access to free labour — they don’t have their own students — and they need to devote staff resource for several months who do nothing but work on the organizing the event. This is similar but on an even larger scale with commercial events such as trade shows who often make money by charging exhibitors rather than attendees.

So while the physical costs disappear, the organizational costs don’t. If anything (as described below), the virtual event needs more attention to every detail of presentation and communication. The communications about arrivals, accommodation and local facilities disappear but they are more than replaced by coordinating virtual work of the organising team, presenters and assistants. Nothing can be left to sort out on the day. The sort of thing that we can leave for the 15-minute check in before registration opens on the first day have to all be sorted out well in advance.

There is also the need to pay the technical provider for the video conferencing costs which is a relatively modest fixed cost but it does not scale infinitely. While with a physical event, there’s a natural limit imposed by the size of the venue, a virtual event is potentially unlimited but organisers have to estimate the attendance to decide on the level of subscription of the conference platform. Online events (particularly when they’re free) have huge drop out rates. For free webinars, it is pretty much the norm that only about 30% of the people who register actually attend. It is not clear whether this rate would be much lower or much higher with online events which are essentially a series of webinars.

In short, online events have a different cost structure but they are not free. We are in an environment where people are increasingly willing to pay not just for access to online resources but also for online experiences. Online events can tap into this but they cannot expect to charge the same. It is just not clear yet what the financial models of online events will turn out to be.

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