Bringing some social life to Zoom conferences (guest post by C. Thi Nguyen)

This is a guest post by C. Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at the University of Utah

OK, I just survived being Program Chair of the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference - a huge, 4-track, 3-day conference that had to go virtual. I didn’t know it was going virtual when I volunteered to head it up, and the entire experience was one long grueling flirtation with disaster. But: it went off with barely a hitch. What I really want to talk about, though, is the surprising success of the experimental social Zoom rooms.

So the ASA Annual has always been my favorite conference. The aesthetics gang is this big, goofy, lovable, amiable family of weirdos. (Who does analytic philosophy... about art? My people, that's who.) And when we realized we had to take it virtual, we thought: we had to do something to recreate that wonderful atmosphere. So Aaron Meskin volunteered to spearhead the effort, and we formed a social idea gang (with Jonathan Weinberg and Andrew Kania) and brainstormed all kinds of experimental ideas.

My guiding observation: big social Zoom rooms full of many strange people are fucking awkward. They're weird; it’s much harder to naturally break into small groups; social chat flows awkwardly. So we tried a bunch of things. First, we ran parallel social sessions, to keep the numbers manageable. (For a 300 person conference, we did 3 parallel social Zoom rooms each night, and ended up with 15-20 people in most rooms.) Second, structure.  We had structured activities for most of the Zoom rooms, including:

• Show and Tell Room
• 3 Minute Silly Talk Room
• Talent Show Room
• Joke Room
• Trivia Room

And they worked... insanely well. Tons of people have messaged me saying they were shocked how well those rooms worked, how much community it built, how fun they were. And I suspect that, even though only some of the attendees went to the social rooms, that the spirit from the social rooms carried through the rest of the conference. A lot of the regulars, and a lot of more talkative newcomers, met and commingled and got to know each other, and I think a lot of the spirit carried into the rest of the conference — especially in the chat.

My very favorite was the "3 Minute Silly Talk" room, which I ran with Anne Eaton. Rules were: people just had to make up a talk on some topic - silly, or small, or maybe just float the inchoate beginnings of a new paper. No topic too wild or too small. 3 minutes to talk, enforced with total strictness, followed by 3 minutes of lightning Q&A. And it was... amazing?

We had talks on the art of movie trailers, on pretending to be an ally while still being in the closet, on how capitalism wants you to believe in aesthetic anti-realism, on black horror. People were laughing, applauding wildly, hooting and hollering with agreement. My friend Sherri Irvin showed intending just to watch, and got so excited that she just had to give a 3-minute talk of her own, on the ethics of squirming on Zoom. (“It’s how other people know you’re alive, and not just a screenshot. When you squirm, I feel your humanity.”) And the ideas were live and sincere, and.... some people thought it was the best part of the conference? It had a bit of the conference feeling that I relish most: of philosophers after-hours, loosening up and spit-balling the really interesting ideas.

Nobody who knows me or my personal (and philosophical) obsession with games will be surprised by this, but: part of the basic idea for this came from my experience with playing games on Zoom. Like, I think a lot of figured out pretty quickly in the pandemic era, that a lot of unstructured Zoom hangouts are pretty awkward past a certain number. It’s bad enough when you’re all friends; it’s absolute murder when you’re thrown into a massive Zoom and have to “socialize” in ginormous professional groups with people you don’t know. Zoom is missing all these subtle visual-spatial cues, of eye contact and body positioning. The micro-lags of Zoom screw with the subtleties of timing and interplay. People are constantly interrupting each other, or trying (and failing) to interject. But, about a month into the first lockdown, my spouse and I started playing a lot of tabletop role-playing games on Zoom with our scattered friends, and… it just works great. The extra structure gives you a clear, shared focus — and makes it easier to know when to talk and when to break-in. 

Each time slot also had a single, unstructured cocktail room. (We also just did a single unstructured lunch room, since we figured we’d have fewer people - my bet, which turned out to be semi-correct, was that people would want to get out and move around and get lunch away from a computer, at lunch break.) The unstructured rooms were also fun as long as they were small, but the people who tended to go and talk were people that already knew each other, that were well-connected in the field. The bigger the room, the more the conversation was dominated by the ASA regulars. My guess: it takes a lot of gumption to speak up in an unstructured big Zoom if you're a junior person in the field, who doesn't already know the gang. A few people can do it, but others can't.

But the structured rooms were full of early career folks, new folks. And since there was a formal queue, everybody got their turn. And I think the presence of a simple focused activity makes it easier to get started, even when you’re in a room full of strangers. And so everybody gets to talk, if they want, and everybody got to meet them. For stuff like Show and Tell, everybody gets to be the center of attention for a while if they want. And having that kind of rotating focus just seems to make chat natural, and easy. And we also get to see people’s heirlooms, sketches, flower gardens, elaborate cat mazes, insect photos, and all sorts of other quirky junk. (When it was my turn at Show and Tell, I took enormous pleasure in inflicting one of my favorite pieces of musical sadism on a room full of unsuspecting philosophers of art).

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

I just want to say that I think this is very cool, and want to thank C. Thi for sharing it!

[Evan]

Great write up, especially insight that relative outsiders struggle to meaningfully participate even more than in real life, and that building in structures where they can reserve a platform is ameliorating. If the vaccine is not the deus ex machina we all hope, it perhaps bears asking how to translate that strategy from mere socializing around conferences to the 'serious philosophy' itself.