Conferences - just a fancy type of "con"?
This has been, surprisingly, a somewhat eventful month, with some archaeology, a visit to an international conference, as well as two big Finnish conventions. Specifically, I gave a presentation in a proper international conference for the very first time, which (as these things usually go) wasn't quite as exciting as I might have expected - and, in a completely different venue, I had coffee with Peter Watts, which was. This has left me with quite a bit of material to compare.
Conferences, I can't help but notice, are not very different from conventions. Sure, you have "keynote speakers" instead of "guests of honor", but they add up to much the same thing - but really, you have themes, panel discussions, comment sessions, lectures, book sale tables, junk, attrocious insider humour, evening dinners, and a bunch of volunteers running the show underneath it all. Mostly students, which is not very surprising, since both often take place at university campuses.
Of course, conferences are serious business, whereas conventions are just for fun. Indeed, on my way to the conference, my connecting flight evaporated from the face of the Earth and I was stuck for a day in Copenhagen and didn't get my bag until a few days later, so it felt like quite a bit of work. On the other hand, the conference just happened to be set in a perfectly agreeable medieval Flemish town with some very nice architecture and, as the conference hosts were wont to remind us at every turn, Shamash truly did smile upon us insofar as the weather was concerned and there was a great deal of Belgian beer available. My presentation, incidentally, did go well enough, though afterwards I spent a lot of time trying to figure out in a surreptitious way who some of the people who commented after my presentation were.
Actually, the big common denominator between the two "cons", though, is that the fun of it is in being stuffed into the same space with a lot of people who are enthusiastic about the same things as you are. Which raises some silly questions, like whether academia - or the humanities, anyway - isn't much more than fandom with pretentions. Sure, in a conference people are supposed to be scholars and experts, which arguably raises the bar of entry higher - but then, there weren't really many people there who were really experts in my area of interest, specifically, so the conversations I had were closer to exchanging "ideas", rather than "knowledge". Which, now that I think about it, is probably very much the point of a gathering of that sort.
But, if so, how's it different from any other enthusiast venue? Peter Watts, who was a guest of honor at this year's FinnCon, is probably one of the more interesting people in the world to have coffee with if you want to have a conversation about brains, cognitive science, neurological problems, psychic powers, alien lifeforms, psychoactive drugs and the (unhappy) future of human society. Of course, he's the kind of sci-fi author who has an afterword with citations to scientific journals at the end of his novels, but still, there's a difference between being an interesting fiction author and an interesting academic author. But in the unique situation of having coffee with them at a "con", the difference isn't really that big!
Later, at RopeCon, a friend suggested that perhaps I should think about giving a talk there some year, what with ruins, archaeology and ancient societies and such being of obvious and substantial interest to people who are into roleplaying. Demographically speaking, I can't help but suspect that in that venue, I'd get a larger and more or less equally enthusiastic audience there than in just about any conference on this field. Which, come to think of it, isn't really a bad thing at all.
Conferences, I can't help but notice, are not very different from conventions. Sure, you have "keynote speakers" instead of "guests of honor", but they add up to much the same thing - but really, you have themes, panel discussions, comment sessions, lectures, book sale tables, junk, attrocious insider humour, evening dinners, and a bunch of volunteers running the show underneath it all. Mostly students, which is not very surprising, since both often take place at university campuses.
Of course, conferences are serious business, whereas conventions are just for fun. Indeed, on my way to the conference, my connecting flight evaporated from the face of the Earth and I was stuck for a day in Copenhagen and didn't get my bag until a few days later, so it felt like quite a bit of work. On the other hand, the conference just happened to be set in a perfectly agreeable medieval Flemish town with some very nice architecture and, as the conference hosts were wont to remind us at every turn, Shamash truly did smile upon us insofar as the weather was concerned and there was a great deal of Belgian beer available. My presentation, incidentally, did go well enough, though afterwards I spent a lot of time trying to figure out in a surreptitious way who some of the people who commented after my presentation were.
Actually, the big common denominator between the two "cons", though, is that the fun of it is in being stuffed into the same space with a lot of people who are enthusiastic about the same things as you are. Which raises some silly questions, like whether academia - or the humanities, anyway - isn't much more than fandom with pretentions. Sure, in a conference people are supposed to be scholars and experts, which arguably raises the bar of entry higher - but then, there weren't really many people there who were really experts in my area of interest, specifically, so the conversations I had were closer to exchanging "ideas", rather than "knowledge". Which, now that I think about it, is probably very much the point of a gathering of that sort.
But, if so, how's it different from any other enthusiast venue? Peter Watts, who was a guest of honor at this year's FinnCon, is probably one of the more interesting people in the world to have coffee with if you want to have a conversation about brains, cognitive science, neurological problems, psychic powers, alien lifeforms, psychoactive drugs and the (unhappy) future of human society. Of course, he's the kind of sci-fi author who has an afterword with citations to scientific journals at the end of his novels, but still, there's a difference between being an interesting fiction author and an interesting academic author. But in the unique situation of having coffee with them at a "con", the difference isn't really that big!
Later, at RopeCon, a friend suggested that perhaps I should think about giving a talk there some year, what with ruins, archaeology and ancient societies and such being of obvious and substantial interest to people who are into roleplaying. Demographically speaking, I can't help but suspect that in that venue, I'd get a larger and more or less equally enthusiastic audience there than in just about any conference on this field. Which, come to think of it, isn't really a bad thing at all.