The conference

My loveliest has already wrtten about going to the conference (the pictures sometimes don't load, and we're not sure why), but what the heck. I was president, after all.

Amazing as it seems, I was let to be president of something, in this case the Society for Phenomenology and Media. I'm a founding member, the only person to have attended all eight of the annual conferences. I hope I was a good president, but I think that despite my leadership qualities (which it turns out, always to my surprise, I have), I couldn't actually do much presiding. Organizing academics to get things done is a lot like herding cats, I like to tell people.

In any event, as a conference of a society for phenomenology and media, the conference was rather lacking in a couple of key elements, namely, phenomenology and media. There were a number of very good papers on media, mostly not involving phenomenology at all, except as an afterthought, an excellent paper on media making no reference to phenomenology at all, two or three goodish papers that involved phenomenology and media to some degree. There were also a large quantity of papers that didn't involve phenomenology or media, and many of those weren't any good, either.

Part of the problem is that the conference was a joint venture of two groups, the other being directed toward deception. But the conference program seemed to mix these indiscriminately, if not actually randomly. I spent a lot of time wondering why presentations were being made in this forum. Phenomenology and media are both broad fields, but not without some distinctness. I would imagine that, generally, presentations that discuss media (as relation, as artifact, as social system, as anything, as long as it discussed media) would seem like a good half-fit, at least. Likewise papers that discuss phenomenology (whether in the transcendental Husserlian, existential Heideggerian, French, or some other mode, as long as it discussed phenomenology) would also seem like a good half-fit.

I don't think there's a lack of interest in media among phenomenology folks, nor lack of interest in phenomenology among media folks. But those with an interest in either would have been puzzled.

By the way, I presented a paper challenging the very notion that a phenomenological investigation of media experience (i.e., the research project that has consumed me for the last 8 or 9 years) is fruitful at all for developing critique of media. I received no comments or questions, because there wasn't time in the schedule.