I was surprised earlier to see that the BSA’s online conference relies on uploading videos in advance. I can see the appeal of this from an organisational point of view, as it reduces dependence upon potentially unreliable chairs to negotiate technical difficulties on the day. But I still find it such a weird proposition to conference delegates. Why would you pay to upload a video which would be circulated to a restricted audience rather than just freely making it available online? At what point does a conference cease being a conference and instead become a private archive of videos available to a paying audience for a set period of time? I realise there will be synchronous events but my understanding is they are the exception rather than the rule at the conference.
I will give it a chance and try to engage but I am sceptical (to put it mildly) about this mode of organising online conferences. If trying to replicate the structure of the f2f conference through platforms is too unwieldy then why not redesign the structure, rather than finding platformised workarounds that eviscerate the interactive content of the conference? It feels to me like a symptom of a broader lack of imagination which characterised the emergency digital scholarship of the pandemic, which has now carried over into an orthodox practice of hybridity which is too often the worst of both modalities. We could have learned so much more from the adaptations of the pandemic and I still don’t entirely understand why we didn’t.
Mark Carrigan 