Conferences are major events for any scientist, allowing him to present his work to other colleagues and receive feedback, while being informed on the latest advances in his discipline. They provide also excellent opportunities for meeting people, exchanging of ideas , not only limited to strict science, while discovering new cities and the local culture. Each one of us remembers not only the presentations that he attended but also a warm conversation with a colleague with a cup of coffee in hand during a break, a dinner with old friends that are now spread over the world or even “that delicious but unknown wine”.
Due to my participation to the online European Aerosol Conference (EAC) of 2020, I realized that online conferences (due to COVID-19 pandemic) are highly successful, even better than traditional conferences, in terms of disseminating scientific results. In a physical-presence conference you have to run (literally) from room to room to attend the presentations that sound interesting to you. You are trying to remember the face of the presenter that you would like to ask a question, but did not had the time to do during the actual session, and try to locate him amongst more than a thousand people, which are spread in venues of thousands of square meters. During an online conference, like the EAC 2020, technology had solved all the above issues. You can watch all the presentations from the cosy environment of your office or even your house, at any time of the day. No worries for people that do not easily remember faces (like me). You just need to type the name of each individual and chat with him directly.
On the other hand, despite the available technology, online conferences cannot simulate the “feeling” of a physical-presence conference. Yes, virtual break/coffee areas existed, where you could interact with other people, but avatars are, at the moment at least, not even close to an actual person. So the non-linguistic (I believe that I used the correct term, although not an anthropologist) communication was missing, together with the excitement of discovering something new, either if it is about a monument or about a nice place for drinks.
Overall, my opinion is that online conferences are excellent for disseminating scientific results, which of course should be their primary goal, but at the moment they lack all the nice “social interaction side-effects”. We all wish that this situation will end soon and perhaps we can exploit all the experience gained in order to combine the best aspects of online conferences with the advantages of the physical participation.
