I spent most of this week’s PhD time allocation in my funding body’s student conference. Basically, I spent two full days on Zoom. It was an interesting experience, though as usual when something takes a big block of my time, it’s left me with reading withdrawal symptoms. I wish I could think of something more systematic to say about the content of the conference, but perhaps it hasn’t really sunk in yet. In the meantime, my thoughts turn to the format.
Online seminars and conferences have been the feature of 2020, and I suppose this is going to continue well into 2021. As a society, we seem to have adapted very quickly, while still recognising the pros and the cons of this format. Contrary to face-to-face, real world events, I find the online versions neither exhausting nor energising, but … just interesting. Certainly, they are less expensive and time-consuming. They are tougher on the eyes and ears, if you have to use a headset the whole time as I do. Leaving one’s own video on all the time is tough, because you know you are always face to face with all the other users, but when everyone turns their video off it feels very inhuman. I think online is easier on introverts or people who hate presenting. Several people did pre-recorded talks, I suspect partly for this reason. So… it favours those who have limited economic and time resources, the introverts, the shy, and the poor-at-small-talk, but it’s tough on extroverts, networkers, and those who crave the human touch. One of my fellow students suggested you have to be more targeted in your networking, which is one of those things which is harder for some. And even if networking has become more topic-focused and less generally social, it has hit-and-miss qualities which cause problems that are hard to fix. I now have bouncing institutional emails from people I am supposed to get in touch with. I will feel terrible if I can’t contact them and it’s a problem we would have ironed out early if we’d been face-to-face.
I just hope the virtual format has nothing to do with my inability to sort out the content of the conference (as of Sunday night). Some people say they experience a loss of engagement with virtual text versus paper text. I have never had that experience at all but I am very much a ‘written word native’. I process the written word better than the spoken word, which I hear (read!) is also unusual. Now, I suspect something weird is happening between me and presentations. In the past, I have always preferred to attend performances than watch TV/video at home, because I know I will engage more.
So yeah – pros and cons.