Diane Ragsdale offers some welcome provocation about major professional arts conferences in her Jumper blog. Says she:
It seems that technology has made redundant much of the purpose of the annual arts conference and that the yearly gathering of the field (if there is still a reason to have one) needs to be transformed. I’m not suggesting there is not a reason for everyone to get on a plane and fly across the country to hang out; but I am suggesting that the purpose (and thus the structure of the event) might need to be radically different from the corporate-style, top-down, sit-and-learn-from-the-leaders-in-your-field conferences to which we’ve all become indoctrinated.
From my experience, the extraordinary bandwidth of face-to-face convenings, and the fuel they bring to essential social and professional networks, provide the reasons for continuing them. I can’t count how many times at these conferences I’ve bump into a colleague or acquaintance, discover what they’re working on, recommend someone they should talk to, and then walk them over and introduce them in person. That might happen online from time to time, but not yet with the same serendipity and human connection.
But I’d agree that the world has changed, the way we gather and disseminate information has changed, and the conference format has not much. So it’s well past time for a reboot.
It seems as though Diane is talking more about the content and format of the presentations, rather than the need to be in person in the same place all together. However, it’s obvious that the people who attend the presentations need the dedicated time and opportunity to engage with this content, and they will continue to justify the current format. At the last few conferences I’ve attended, the presentation content was only redundant for a small fraction of the attendees.