Conferences: an antidote to our digital derangement

 

Is the tide turning against our tech overlords?

In a landmark court case starting today, 29 US states are seeking billions of dollars in damages from Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, who they accuse of intentionally designing addictive products to hook children and, consequently, fuelling a mental health crisis in the young.

Meanwhile countries – including Australia and the UK – have announced outright bans on social media use by children under the age of 16, in measures that have received huge support from angst-ridden parents and the wider public. Many others countries are now examining similar proposals.

So, where does this leave the adults in the room?

Still at the mercy of the algorithm, I fear.

When we enter the online world we lose some of our agency. Even the ‘digitally aware’ amongst us know that we are being fed curated content – pushing us deeper into ideological silos. If this could be contained online, the problems would be less serious. But, of course, that’s not how it works.

The digital world has seeped into the ‘real world’ with deleterious effects. Just look around. Politics is a mess, while public discourse has been reduced to a vicious slanging match between ‘gammons’ and the ‘wokerati’ - ridiculous caricatures nobody would recognise in themselves.

Some say the internet has democratised the spread of information, and there is truth in that statement. The best ‘alternative media’ has provided a welcome, zesty challenge to the mainstream media, which had been resting on its laurels as the self-appointed gatekeepers of public knowledge.

The flip side has been the proliferation of fly-by-night clickbait merchants, fake news, the triumph of opinion over expertise, and the relentless pushing of simple fixes to complex problems, that being what online audiences want. Nobody has the time – or the attention span – to study the detail of the claims being made. Easier to blame the man and move on.

This could explain why the leaders of Europe’s major economies are now facing historically low approval ratings. My own country, the UK, has burned through seven prime ministers in the last 10 years as we begin to resemble an ungovernable rabble. For context, there were only 20 prime ministers in the whole of the 20^th century – a time when news travelled much more slowly, paper and ink was how most people consumed it, and nobody expected instant results to significant challenges.

Is there any escape from the madness?

Against today’s febrile atmosphere, I thank God for the humble conference.  Today, there is something quietly radical about simply gathering in the same room as other people. Deliberately creating spaces for people to meet, listen, and agree and disagree, becomes a form of civic resistance when algorithms are optimised to outrage and confirm biases.

When so much of our professional life has been compressed into screens, feeds, and notifications, conferences can seem a little quaint perhaps - people travelling for hours to sit amongst their colleagues, listen to someone imparting information, and then chat about it over a coffee. But this quaintness increasingly looks like the point.

We are living through an age of digital derangement: a culture in which information is abundant, but attention is scarce. In such an environment, there is great intrinsic value in stepping away and entering an altogether calmer space where ideas can be heard, considered, and discussed in real life.

A good conference is not just a sequence of presentations. It is a temporary community devoted to thinking seriously about something that matters. To sit with peers from different countries, disciplines and traditions is to encounter knowledge that cannot be transmitted through a link. A raised eyebrow, a hesitant question, an unexpected conversation in a corridor: these small human encounters have become the real meaning – the value - of meetings and events.

Without wanting to sound pompous, there is a moral dimension here, too.

Research has shown trust is easier to establish in-person, when we meet one another as human beings rather than avatars. At conferences we discover the person behind the expert opinion: their humour, curiosity, generosity and doubt. When we can see - feel - someone’s humanity, professional, or even political, disagreements becomes less threatening and more ... interesting.

With large and diverse memberships, associations can act as a buffer against the harsher aspects of modern life. By encouraging debate while showing zero tolerance for personal abuse, by framing disagreement in the language of competing virtues and resolving them in a way that doesn’t involve one side standing with its foot on the other side’s throat, they can be places where adults remember what it was like to be an adult. And the conference and events they organise can be living, breathing, real-life embodiments of those values.