The most important thing about an event is who isn’t there.

A friend posted about an event she would be co-hosting:
The Ethics of Living Online: A conversation with 2Fik and Alana Conner
Wednesday, November 6th, 2019, 6-8 pm, Carleton College

I commented: perhaps there could be a companion event, ‘The Ethics of Living Offline’? Exploring ethical implications of having events or any social arrangements that are partly or only in physical space[1].

But where am I coming from on this, one wonders? Being a longtime public / professional event goer, but also nethead and remote attendee, I’ve long and recently been encouraging (and sometimes helping) event organizers to support online and media dimensions to events. They already do to at least to a degree, e.g. in arranging, publicizing, registering people.

However, speaking for the shut-in, remote, untimely, schedule-uncertain, the backchannel, wallflowers at the event, historians, robots, etc, I tend to encourage, and sometimes offer to or do organize: livestream &/or archived video, and audio version (podcast!), social-media coordination such as promulgating & tracking a hashtag, online collaborative live-noting.

I realize there may be concerns e.g. about how ‘public’ or surveillable people want the event to be, or notifying / getting consent from presenters, or dissuading in-person attendance or ticket sales. In practice, though, I find these are usually not strong concerns or difficult problems, and in fact many parties involved would really like events to be more public, have wider and longer-term participation, have [social] media impact, and be better documented/preserved for later uses.

Usually it seems organizers just haven’t thought about non-physical dimensions to the event, or they think it would be difficult to do, or generally/implicitly think the physical participants are the legitimate & worthwhile ones. I’m here to say, possibly au contraire, mon frère! Get a few things on your organizers’ checklist early on and they can be easy. Pick and promulgate a hashtag, put it up on a poster on podium or next to screen, and bingo, you have backchannels and harvestable social media. Ask for someone to sit in front and pop up Facebook app — which has made this ridiculously easy — to do video post, and bingo, you can have video stream &/or archive.

Who cares about slightly more networked events, though, you might ask? Well aside from inclusion of those with special needs and special interests, which is to say most publics, we could consider two significant other areas where effects of physical participation are studied and critiqued, are voting, and public land-use meetings.

In voting, Oregon pioneered mail-only voting in 2001 (and also automatic “motor voter” registration when you get drivers license), and now voting rate is in the top tier among states. On the other hand, places with the lowest and least fair voting participation are often cities and southern states with a history of using physical hindrances like too few or too remote voting places, for voter suppression. Not that places doing that will be eager to redress this situation with mail-in voting, but the comparison stands.

The effects of physical vs other participation are a big issue in the field of housing & local land-use, a main focus area for me. Since the 1960s, US local land-use decision-making has institutionalized many forms of public participation. But it’s become increasingly argued that the result has been exclusionary and undemocratic, in part because opportunity to participate in physical meetings tends to be so unequally distributed. Three researchers at Boston University. have studied this widely by analyzing minutes from public meetings, and wrote a soon-out book on topic which has caused much discussion: “Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis.” [see cover at left].

[the paper version, free PDF: Epstein, Katherine Levine, Maxwell Palmer, & David Glick. “Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes.” 2018. [forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics]].

We tend to think of ‘online’ or media as secondary, less real, and perhaps needing ethical curbs compared to ‘real’ in-person interaction. But perhaps this reflects problematic assumptions about who the legitimate participants are or should be, and how public or participatory are the processes we are enabling.

Peter Drucker said, “the most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” [source]. Likewise, perhaps often the most important thing about an event is who isn’t there.

[1] note: ‘in person’, ‘real-world’, ‘actual’ etc are deprecated as tendentious framing, in this point of view. vs e.g. ‘offline’, ‘physical’. see also “digital dualism” critique.