The Extratextuals

A whirlwind week for me just ended. This time 8 days ago, I was in Vancouver for my best friend’s wedding, where, as Best Man, I had to do more than just the standard sit, eat, drink, and show everyone how badly I dance. Then it was back to New York for my Green Card interview, an event which proved anti-climactic, but that taxed heavily on my mind in the lead up: it’s very weird to be put in the situation of needing to prove that your spouse is your spouse. Moreover, M. and I tend to finish each other’s sentences, which you’d think is a good way of proving we’re married, but the lawyer instructed us that in this setting it might appear as though we’re “cheating” by helping one another answer questions. Anyways, it’s all done now, and I’m a permanent resident of the United States of America. What better way to celebrate than to leave the country? So off I went to ICA (the International Communication Association conference) in Montreal the next day.

ICA is at a good time of the year to make sure that lots of people can attend, but at an awful time for facilitating the process of actually paying attention to papers. By the end of May, I’m simply burnt out. So this year I went in with a new strategy. I had signed up for the pre-conference on Production Studies, which tied me down to a day of panels. And I was on another four – one paper, one workshop, one chair, one respondent. So I decided that that was it. The rest of the conference would be social.

Such is the oddity of conference paper presentations that I’m convinced I learnt more, discussed more, and was asked to think about more as a result of adopting this strategy. The pre-conference was excellent, if a little paper heavy and discussion light. And my panels had good material – Melissa Click, Nina Huntemann, and Cornel Sandvoss provided a strong, really interesting panel on flow and overflow; Megan Boler, Andrea Schmidt, Catherine Burwell, and Alessandra Renzi had a good panel on digital dissent; reliably, Avi Santo and Jeffrey Jones presented good papers on animated satire, and the Unboxing Television workshop with Amanda Lotz, Joshua Green, Laurie Ouellette, Aswin Punathambekar, John McMurria, Vicki Mayer, and myself worked very well, I thought, providing plenty of smart commentary on the state of television and television studies.

But many of the better interactions with ideas happened over meals, drinks, coffee, or simply sitting outside conference rooms. Jeff Jones was my roommate, and our late night conversations about politics, satire, and television generated plenty of ideas. Aswin Punathambekar offered some wonderful hypotheses for my forthcoming research in Malawi while we sat on the carpet outside the book room. Avi Santo and I had a few good chats about transmedia, career advice flowed fast and furious from many colleagues and friends, book or paper ideas were born over lunches, dinners, or pints, and so on.

I’ve been to a few paperless conferences in the last two years – at Flow in Austin, and at Futures of Entertainment 2, Unboxing Television, and the Convergence Culture Consortium Retreat in Cambridge. And I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is how conferences should proceed. I’m not adverse to papers per se, but I do tend to find that I’ve already decided that it’s worth reading the full paper, or not worth listening any longer, by the three minute mark, thus making the remaining 12 or 17 minutes largely pointless either way. The lack of interactivity, not just of the sessions, but moreso of the ideas, frustrates me with paper panels. As a listener, I’d like to get more involved, ask questions, test the ideas, and play with them; as a presenter, I’d like discussion, response, and/or debate.

I sometimes wonder, then, if the ideal conference wouldn’t look something like this: a panel brings together 5-8 people working on related issues. They discuss their work in under 5 minutes each. Then discussion opens up. Then everyone goes for a meal or a drink. Or maybe the best conference would begin at the final step, in a restaurant, or over drinks.

It’s an issue of how best to use the time. As a television studies-ish scholar, I’ll likely never have many colleagues in any department doing the same work. So ICA, SCMS, and the other variable conferences are my only chances to see people face to face. When I’m there, why should we play this game of reading papers? Before the Internet, and before there were 1001 journals on every topic, perhaps such a structure was ideal, or at least necessary. But I can now get people’s work and read it, learning way more from it, later. I want conferences to alert me to work I didn’t know was there, yes, but otherwise I want to spend my time chatting, establishing networks and connections, plotting, collaborating, and debating.

I did that this ICA, and it’s perhaps no surprise, then, that this was not only one of the most fun conferences I’ve ever been to, but by far one of the most generative of thought. I met some new people, heard some new ideas, had old ideas challenged, I luxuriated in the company of good friends, I met “old hegemons” (as Jean Burgess called them) and grad students alike, and instead of spending my last ounces of energy for the academic year, I had my energy cells recharged and rejuvenated for the summer.

conferences conferences, ICA