How to Have Meetings in the Future

It’s almost time for my big professional meeting—the American Anthropological Association Conference—this year to be held in New Orleans. It’s like any other professional group, really, if perhaps a little scarier (doesn’t the thought of 6000 anthropologists gathered in one place kind of sound scary?). But my problems go beyond this. Every year we rotate through a series of huge, corporate hotels—the only hotels large enough to accommodate our numbers and our insatiable need for space (altogether about 180,000 square feet). To say that this limits the cities we visit is an understatement—D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia. If you’ve gone to big conferences in your respective professions, then you know those cities well.

Or, maybe you don’t. The other truism of the big conference is its insularity—several days in window-less meeting rooms with power-point presentations, followed by semi-cathartic moments in the hotel bar. But you could do that anywhere—it’s the same windowless rooms, the same re-cycled air. In other words, classic “non-place”:
If a place can be identified as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a
space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with
identity will be a non-place. (Auge 1995: 77-78)
The conference hotel, the airport, the corporate chain restaurant—it’s travel without actually going anywhere. To me, coming home from one of these feels like walking outside after being laid up with the flu for a couple of days—giddy and liberating.

And there are other concerns. The big conference is really the professional version of Wal-Mart, with its one stop shopping (take classes, interview for jobs, give professional papers, meet publishers) and its insidiously bland, pre-packaged experiences. Also, in terms of labor—the whole venture is bank-rolled by some of the lowest-paid folks around, notwithstanding the efforts of some groups (like UNITE-HERE) to organize workers for higher pay and benefits (www.unitehere.org). While the community that supports the hotel-plex (often in the form of lucrative incentives), may not see much benefit.

So do I really have to go? Of course, courtesy of that combination of technology and metaphor which currently guides our emergent information society, I can stay home and attend virtually—courtesy of lots of webinar apps, including enough social media to support “personal” encounters. I’m not fond of these, but, to be fair, they are certainly capable of delivering “content”. More interesting are hybrid meetings that combine webinars and social networking with face-to-face interactions—effectively serving as both a virtual conference and a more traditional, face-to-face conference.

But all of these great applications and services, however, ignore findings in sociology and anthropology that show that computer mediated communication works in conjunction with face-to-face encounters. That is, people don’t invest fortunes in iPhones so they can hole away in their rooms—they use them to facilitate all kinds of physical encounters that unfold over real (not virtual) space. The burgeoning literature on “third spaces” (that is, spaces where people congregate between work and home: coffee shops, lounges) suggests the lengths to which computer-mediated communications help people carve out place from the complex, urban spaces in which they live (Urry 2007).

Taking this lesson to big meetings means actually holding your meeting in the city—in neighborhoods, in books-shops, church basements, museums, public libraries, park pavilions. Picture 6000 people fanned out over multiple, city blocks, linked together by overlapping events, Wifi and social networking. A conference? If it had a relatively stable program with easily searchable interfaces and identifiable locations it could really accommodate something that big.

But perhaps there’s something more needed: the serendipitous, yet ultimately salubrious, encounter with someone with whom you might later co-author, hire, or be hired by. Suddenly striking up a conversation with someone who opens doors for you (real or metaphorical). This is the big argument that people trot out to defend our huge conferences: if we didn’t all cram ourselves into these corporate hotels for a week at a time, then our graduate students would never be able to find work. But here, intelligent, meeting agents might be helpful—software that charts an itinerary and walking route that is most likely to bring you into contact with people you might enjoy sharing conversation with—like Amazon’s search engine-generated recommendations. Monitoring social networking traffic in real-time, such an agent could recommend different places based on keyword searching or profiles, and chart a course accordingly.

I think it’s time to invite the city to the conference, not just the conference to the city.

References

Auge, Marc (1995). Non-places. NY: Verso.

Urry, John (2007). Mobilities. Malden, MA: Polity Press.