A little more than a week ago, I attended an in-person academic conference. The conference used the Whova (Hoo-va) app to share programming and all other vital information.
A quick rewind: Before the pandemic, attending this conference had many more analog features. Most importantly (in the context of this post), the organizers provided a printed program. As attendees, after receiving the program booklet, we took a seat on the hotel carpet, got our hotel pens out, and began circling the sessions we wanted to attend. In the process of working through the paper program, we read many session descriptions, which sometimes swayed us to see sessions we might otherwise have skipped or overlooked. The program became a map, an artifact, and a piece of memorabilia.
Now, the app obviously saves the trees (or, as the Whova advertising would have it: “cuts down on printing costs”), and what’s not to like about that? I support saving the trees, but the app is much more and much less than a printed program. As is often the case, when an app offers to streamline and enhance an experience, the interventions create additional cost & labor for the user, for you, the conference goer.
It begins like this: you have to download the app from your trusted app store (that everyone has a smart-phone is assumed). And then, to make the app functional, you click through agreements you don’t have time to read (because you are feverishly working on your conference presentation). For all you know, you have just sold all quantifiable aspects of your soul and given the Whova-people the okay to keep an eye on you and your data.
Welcome!
Before you even attend the conference, the app already wants you to “engage.”
As a presenter, you’re asked to upload your bio and your presentation (never mind that a time-honored tradition of conference attendance is finishing your presentation about 10 minutes before you give it or while you give it.) You’re reminded that sharing your work on the app makes it accessible to people. How accessible should your work be, you wonder? Should it be part of the Whova’s archive? You don’t have time to think about that. The only thing that keeps you from uploading your work is that you haven’t finished it.
As an attendee, you are also asked to introduce yourself to all the other attendees via an icebreaker post. A bland, prewritten message is available. Or else you can spend time and creative energy on crafting your own. On the introduction board, 900+ people said hello. And really, what does one do with 900+ cute hello posts? You have no time to even think about that.
You’re at the conference finally, at that hotel atrium, and people have their Whova-branded conference IDs and are walking around staring at their phones /at the app. Everybody is receiving messages about drink tickets, ramen meet-ups, and all other conference events, including the agenda of presentations. There are too many events to keep track of, too many to absorb. You focus on finishing your work, but there comes a message that asks you to promote your session.
You shake your head. Were you supposed to have a promotional strategy?
Some people promote their sessions. Those who have social media energy, savvy, aptitude, time & labor to devote to an event-promoting strategy.
You don’t have any of these, and also, you have no time to figure this out. But it starts feeling like you SHOULD get in on this app life.
Not entirely voluntarily, you check the listing for your presentation and find out that you have one like. Yes, there are likes, and you can gather them. Also, people can signal if they plan to attend your session. So, as a presenter, you will likely find out quickly (even before your presentation) whether there’s substantial interest in what you have to offer… or not.
You learn to partially evaluate your contribution by these metrics of general popularity and, thereby, feel nudged to promote your event. You still have no time for that, because you have to revise your work still. But you’ll notice something vaguely shame-like sitting in your gut. You should, shouldn’t you, be “announcing”, “interacting”, “connecting”, and “engaging” via Whova. For the sake of your work!
You don’t, though. Because you have the actual work to do. You don’t look at the app until…
After your presentation (which goes well, and dammit you finished it!), you’ll get a notification from Whova about how many people attended. Perhaps that notification will come with confetti graphics and maybe a little banner that says “high-attendance session” or something like that. This makes you feel good, and you also know that Whova’s headcount can’t be right. You were there. You know that there were people in the room who did not attend your session. But that’s not the important part. You wonder how the app even knows how many people attended or were in the room. You suddenly understand that the app knows exactly where in this Hyatt you and your phone are at any given time. It will simply mark you as present. You think that Whova also knows which bathroom in this Hyatt you visited and when.
When checking your event on the app, you see that it would have given you the opportunity to lead a Q&A in-app or to poll your audience. You did not do that, and at this point, you don’t care. You’re just glad you’ve finished your research and presented it.
A propos polls: Sometimes, the conference organizer might want to foster engagement by creating a conference-wide poll. This can be done with more or less nuance and purpose. Expect some less nuanced polls like “How sick are you of hearing about (insert topic here)?” With answer choices from “not at all” to “enough already!”
As you ponder the basicness of this poll you were nudged to participate in, you wonder: This fosters what kind of participant engagement exactly? What is the definition of “engagement” here? “Engagement” seems to mean a haptic signaling of rudimentary opinion by pressing the “like” button, pressing an answer option on a poll, or pressing “post” for an icebreaker message. All these superficial emissions are legible as “engagement” in app-world.
From this poll-driven, comparative atmosphere, it’s only a quick jump to explicit gamification. And yes, you get a message about the leaderboard. Whova has a leaderboard. And yes, Whova has badges. What is rewarded is the extrovert commenting on a lot of things lightly.
Finally, during a last glance at Whova while you’re waiting to check out of the Hyatt, you notice that you’ve accumulated 4 likes! You should have more. Or you should care less. You remind yourself that you did get confetti. You can’t believe you’re weighing confetti and likes.The likes and the confetti, they do something.
And what they do is dispositionally herd you from a context of scholarly exchange into one of social comparison. When, previously, you would have engaged by thinking about an academic project deeply with others, your attention is now partially diverted to creating an online performance of engagement, scholarly worthiness, and popularity.
You have to admit it; you failed at Whova, and the only thing that makes you feel redeemed is a look at your self-awarded failure badge.
