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It's Friday. I have some nice things lined up this weekend, and only five more days of work for the year, which is an excellent feeling. Today, I've been thinking about all the wonderful online events I've attended recently.
I posted last weekend about having attended a series of panels and Q&As associated with the British Library's fantasy literature/film/etc exhibition from the comfort of my own living room. In addition, I went to a panel discussion on (geo)political, social and economic outlook for Kosovo, featuring experts and some opening remarks from the prime minister of the country — the event was in Pristina, but again I was able to watch it from home. And there's a Kate Elliott Q&A waiting on Youtube for me to watch, and a Zoom event with my favourite Ukrainian journalists coming up, and I watched a Zoom tutorial on how to make pancakes filled with poppyseeds and fried in butter during my lunchbreak, and so on and so on. You get the idea.
Obviously the concept of webinars and livestreams existed before the pandemic, but I feel that they really became mainstream during the first lockdowns, and have become established and accepted (I would almost say, in certain contexts, expected) modes of delivery. To my mind, this is a very good thing. Before this, if I'd wanted to attend most author events, at the least I would have had to travel to Cambridge, if not London, or have been barred from attending due to distance or time difference altogether (the number of north American events I've been able to attend now is staggering, and the willingness of Ukrainian journalists, activists, and people working in the culture sector to host online discussions in English is incredibly generous — I even participated in a couple of Zoom panel discussions with librarians working in an equivalent university setting in Kharkiv, and we all learnt a lot from each other). It just opened up the wider world in a way that is almost the opposite of what might have been expected in a time when large numbers of people were mandated to stay apart. It's definitely a change wrought by the pandemic that I'm very glad seems to have stuck.
What about you?
(Just a quick note to say that this is not the space to relitigate arguments about frustrations that masking, distancing, and isolating from others when ill did not survive after the point most governments declared the pandemic to be 'over'. Everyone knows how everyone on all sides of this issue feels, and I just don't feel it's a productive discussion to continue here. My prompting question is about positive changes that have been retained, so please stick to responses in that vein.)
I posted last weekend about having attended a series of panels and Q&As associated with the British Library's fantasy literature/film/etc exhibition from the comfort of my own living room. In addition, I went to a panel discussion on (geo)political, social and economic outlook for Kosovo, featuring experts and some opening remarks from the prime minister of the country — the event was in Pristina, but again I was able to watch it from home. And there's a Kate Elliott Q&A waiting on Youtube for me to watch, and a Zoom event with my favourite Ukrainian journalists coming up, and I watched a Zoom tutorial on how to make pancakes filled with poppyseeds and fried in butter during my lunchbreak, and so on and so on. You get the idea.
Obviously the concept of webinars and livestreams existed before the pandemic, but I feel that they really became mainstream during the first lockdowns, and have become established and accepted (I would almost say, in certain contexts, expected) modes of delivery. To my mind, this is a very good thing. Before this, if I'd wanted to attend most author events, at the least I would have had to travel to Cambridge, if not London, or have been barred from attending due to distance or time difference altogether (the number of north American events I've been able to attend now is staggering, and the willingness of Ukrainian journalists, activists, and people working in the culture sector to host online discussions in English is incredibly generous — I even participated in a couple of Zoom panel discussions with librarians working in an equivalent university setting in Kharkiv, and we all learnt a lot from each other). It just opened up the wider world in a way that is almost the opposite of what might have been expected in a time when large numbers of people were mandated to stay apart. It's definitely a change wrought by the pandemic that I'm very glad seems to have stuck.
What about you?
(Just a quick note to say that this is not the space to relitigate arguments about frustrations that masking, distancing, and isolating from others when ill did not survive after the point most governments declared the pandemic to be 'over'. Everyone knows how everyone on all sides of this issue feels, and I just don't feel it's a productive discussion to continue here. My prompting question is about positive changes that have been retained, so please stick to responses in that vein.)