Responding to Beth and Steven’s excellent proposal, (”Couldn’t we rethink this a bit?”) though not, lamentably, in the form of a comment — the idea of expanding the conference format via modern technology is exciting and full of promise…
They don’t say so explicitly, but I think that one massive benefit would be to increase the participation of that significant segment of the CAA membership who don’t have the time, money or lack of airline-induced carbon-emission guilt to be able to attend any given conference. I’m sure many of us would gladly pay a fee to watch streaming video of selected sessions - and it’s really the next logical step from the already-existing audio recordings.
Added to that are the large number of actual attendees who can’t see a given session because of interviews, appointments, conflicting obligations, etc. (To state the obvious, I have been posting session reviews for the benefit of anyone who was interested but couldn’t be there.)
There are plenty of potential revenue streams here! To go along with the potential for intellectual enlightenment, of course.
Personally, I’d much rather download someone’s paper as a PDF, then go to a session and hear them in a dialogue about their work, than listen to someone read a text aloud. It just seems inefficient.
