[Air-l] conference thoughts

[Nancy Baym]

I thought I'd share some of my many thoughts on the conference also 
in hopes that others will chime in.  I have to agree with all of 
Steve's comments, and the others that have been posted. I think these 
conferences and aoir were meant to happen, and I come home really 
excited about the continued intellectual stimulation and the 
interpersonal opportunities they offer.

Like everyone else who went, I didn't get to hear as many papers as I 
wanted, not just because there were too many to choose from, but 
often because I found myself in a conversation that I didn't want to 
leave. The papers I did see were overall very good, and offered what 
I think is missing from internet work at other conferences -- the 
assumption that the audience knew a lot already, which meant many 
things were presented at higher levels than they would be elsewhere. 
I was also particularly struck by the quality of discussions that 
followed presentations. I would look around the room and see many 
people, including but importantly not limited to many whose work I 
have read and admired, engaging in really substantive conversation 
about advanced issues while everyone leaned forward, paid full 
attention, and nodded. I saw that level of high quality interaction 
and engagement repeated in room after room.

There were also a number of interesting synergies and points of 
repetition between papers both within and across panels. A few 
recurrent themes that struck me: A strong shift to conceptualizing 
the internet as integrated into everyday life. Calls for 
differentiated understandings of the internet and its users. 
Curiousity about what we might learn from thinking about the 
significance of the net in terms of its absence. I'm sure others 
noted other conceptual themes, and I would really like to hear them.

I was worried after Sept 11 that our international attendance might 
suffer, and I was thrilled at the internationalism of the event. On 
top of a dose of many of my favorite americans, i got to speak with 
people from denmark, austria, australia, the netherlands, finland, 
norway, sweden, israel, england, india, france, italy, canada, and 
more, and i know there were people i didn't get to speak with from 
still other nations. At every panel, there were multiple accents in 
the discussion. I admire the many people who contributed to this 
conference in English though it is not their native toungue and who 
flew long expensive flights across big time changes to get there. 
Thanks for the extra effort. It really affirmed that we NEED people 
from multiple points of view to keep us reminded of our own 
limitations and open up new avenues of thought. I really look forward 
to being in Maastricht next year.

The conference's intellectual substance also made me think a lot 
about what aoir is and can become. Phil Agre's excellent keynote, 
which many of you missed, argued (among other things) that internet 
research is not a field but "a network of unique hybrids," by which 
he meant that each of us is a person who by the very nature of 
looking at the internet  represents bridges our field of origin and 
other areas.  A panel that followed later in the morning on social 
capital got me thinking of this association as a _community network_ 
of unique hybrids, and drove home for me that the point of aoir 
should be to raise the social capital of all of us hybrids. Part of 
this is providing opportunities like this conference to network with 
other individuals. Part of this will be providing resources such as 
archives of syllabi, papers, abstracts, data sets. There are also a 
lot of things we can do that we haven't thought of yet. We have the 
experts on using the internet to build community and raise communal 
social capital within our ranks, and I hope that those of you who 
study these things as observers might be motivated to apply them 
proactively to build our community. And I hope that anyone with ideas 
about what aoir can do will raise those ideas for discussion or email 
them to me offlist.

For me, this conference did feel like community in a way that other 
conferences (except last years!) do not. The fact that so many people 
came back after last year made many faces familiar. Even though I 
didn't know most of the people there, I looked around the room so 
many times and thought that this crowd didn't look like a collection 
of colleagues but like a feast of friends. That the people I have 
taken to be my intellectual colleagues turn out to also be the sorts 
I want as friends is a massive treat. This was facilitated by 
everyone's casual and friendly attitude and attire, which made 
starting conversations easy. I think we succeeded in setting aside 
boundaries between disciplinary perspectives, topics of specific 
interest, nations, professional rank, and so on. I hope this tone 
continues for years. In this time of international violence and fear, 
being with this crowd was a wonderful and needed refuge. Thanks.

I'm saving bits to help the war effort, so will stop here. Please 
share your thoughts were you there. And please come next year if you 
weren't.

Nancy
_______________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym, Communication Studies
University of Kansas
NEW! email: nbaym at ku.edu
NEW! snail mail: 102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
NEW! url: http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym