President's Message: Can You Hear Us Now?
Unless you've been hiding out and resolutely avoiding all of the ICA Newsletters and e-mails, you know that we introduced a new feature at this year's conference in Boston: the Virtual Conference, which provided an additional modality for presenting papers, as well as a number of additional features. Building on the success of an initial experiment conducted during the 2010 Singapore conference, where over 500 folks signed up for the online conference, this year's was a much-expanded effort to utilize the opportunities afforded by newly available technologies.
Working closely with our publishing partners, Wiley-Blackwell, we added a new stream of conference papers to the familiar paper and poster display sessions. A total of 100 papers were posted online, organized into a sessions by nearly every Division and Interest Group. In addition, there were a number of live sessions keyed to the online papers. We live-streamed the opening and closing plenaries; posted two prerecorded keynote lectures; and offered publishing workshops and online book exhibits.
The motives for initiating the online conference component come from several directions. ICA has committed itself to improving its environmental performance, and our Task Force on Greening ICA has recommended exploring options for folks to participate in ICA conferences without having to travel, thus reducing their carbon footprint. It seemed worth exploring the possibility of engaging scholars anywhere in the world in the conference conversation without requiring their physical presence.
A second reason we were attracted to the virtual conference was to provide a way to expand the space for presentations at the conference beyond the existing formats of live papers and panels and poster display sessions (which have not really caught on in communication despite becoming standard in psychology and many of the sciences). This year's conference offered a stark reminder of the pressure on our limited conference space. We had a record number of submissions and consequently the lowest acceptance rates for an ICA conference. High standards are to be applauded, of course, but it seems clear that our limited session space meant that some excellent papers and proposals had to be rejected. The open-ended possibilities offered by the virtual conference promise to provide at least a partial solution to this problem.
Third, and possibly most important, it seems incumbent on ICA as a community of communication scholars to explore the possibilities that new technologies offer. Many of us routinely incorporate newer ICT modalities into our teaching and research, and it seems natural to find ways to include these in the menu of conference formats. For example, even with the provision of internet connections and AV display in our conference rooms, the session format is not able to permit authors to include anything but very short audio/video examples in live presentations. Papers posted on the virtual conference site, in contrast, can - and many did - incorporate substantial audio/visual materials, whether exemplary illustrations or original research recordings, etc. Further, we are all familiar with the experience of a session ending without adequate time for discussion. The virtual conference sessions, not confined to a particular 75-minute slot, offer the possibility of extended discussion among the authors, the designated respondent and other participants.
In our judgment the experiment was a clear success, although it was certainly also a learning experience and a work-in-progress. While we have no doubt that this initial foray justified our decision to undertake this innovative venture, we are equally aware that we need to learn from what didn't work well as well as from what worked well, and that we foresee further improvements as we plan for next year's conference (please e-mail next year's program chair, President-Elect Cynthia Stohl -- cstohl@comm.ucsb.edu -- with suggestions for next year's conference).
How did we do? Most of the participants in the online conference were also physically present in Boston -- not entirely surprising, as Boston had record attendance for an ICA conference. The site received a total of nearly 2,400 visits, 318 of them from Boston. Daily visits ranged from 156 on May 28 to 284 on May 24. In general, online participants from the U.S. made up the largest number by far, followed by Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Croatia, Spain, and Norway. Some of the remote attendees reported feeling present; as one participant wrote, "I felt as if I was there [and I am in Spain]."
The most popular components of the online conference were the recorded keynote addresses by Barbie Zelizer and Henry Jenkins, and this seems like a feature that we will want to expand in the future. We should also work to make these talks more interactive, with opportunities for response and discussion. The opening and closing plenaries also attracted a lot of attention, in addition to the packed, overflow audiences present in the room. These sessions were video recorded and we plan to put the videos up on the ICA website soon. (In addition, the presentations at the opening plenary will shortly be published in the International Journal of Communication - http://ijoc.org.)
There were 100 papers posted in the online session, and it appears that we have packed the program too full for our participants. Many papers received multiple visits and downloads, and many attracted discussion and commentary. The discussions were often back-and-forth exchanges between respondent and author, showing that the format does offer the possibility for an extended dialogue, something not always possible in the tight confines of a live session. Still we know that there are ways in which these online paper sessions can be improved and made more productive for presentation and discussion.
The least successful component of the virtual conference was the live sessions, to which contributors and readers of papers were invited to engage with each other. We will be giving a lot of thought to ways of making any live component of the virtual conference more productive. The exception here was the Monday morning live session organized by the Games Studies Interest Group. In this instance, owing to the extensive prior planning and investment in the technical capabilities of the room for online engagement, the session demonstrated some of the more exciting possibilities we hope this format will realize in the future.
Speaking for myself, if not for my colleagues in organizing the conference, the role of social media, Twitter in particular, turned out to be more important and critical than we had anticipated. I know, many of you are muttering "Duh" at that last sentence, but I confess to being a nonparticipant in the brave new world of 140 characters in search of an idea (ouch). However, I can certainly promise that next year's conference will not only have an agreed-upon hashtag determined and advertised well in advance, and a Facebook page, but these social media will be more integrated into the conference and the virtual component in particular. I am afraid that I can't promise that we will have accomplished the same with whatever new forms of social media are now slouching towards Silicon Valley to be born.