Within .... Thus .... Without

There was a time when going to a conference or seminar had two aspects of continuing your education. The first was the more formal, stated reason – the class is about a particular topic, and you learn about that topic in the lectures and, later, watching the unending PowerPoint presentations.

Sometimes, though, this wasn’t the most important part of the learning process. After all, you could get most of the knowledge offered in the class from the book or materials provided, should you actually chose to read them.

Incidentally, does anyone ever really come away from a continuing education class and actually read the materials afterwards? Everyone I know just grabs the forms, then when the topic comes up again they look back at the stuff as necessary to get through the immediate project. After a while – either when the bookshelf gets full or the material becomes dated, the binders and essential bits are harvested like organs from a donor and another topic takes its place.

The more informational aspect of many seminars, though, came from the conversations that you had during breaks with the other attendees. It was a way for older, more knowledgeable professionals to impart some of the “tricks of the trade” to newbies. I don’t know how many times the random person I sat next to at lunch ended up offering suggestions on how to approach a situation I might be encountering at work, thus making my life easier.

The more gray hair I got, the more that I got to be the one offering suggestions, too, and in this way refined my own craft since explaining something to someone makes you think through how and why you do particular things, thus getting the fundamentals down.

In the last few years, though, that sense of camaraderie has tended to go away, sucked into the ether by those little musical totems that most everyone carries with them from the moment they get out of bed in the morning until their eyes finally shut at night.

I speak, of course, of the cell phone.

Now, instead of chatting with the folks next to you while standing in line for the buffet that invariably includes some form of chicken, most everyone seems to instantly clap their little noisebox to their ear and immediately depart to the far corners of the meeting halls to call the office, their spouse, the babysitter, or any of the other places that seem to need our attention.

Before cell phones, when we knew that there were only 6 pay phones for 150 people attending a seminar this continuous contact wasn’t possible. The important people in our lives were simply told, “I’ll be unavailable tomorrow. Handle it.”

Amazingly enough, things usually got handled. Those that didn’t waited until the following day. If something was really, really urgent, a note got put on the door at the conference hall, but that rarely happened.

Instead we talked with people who had similar interests, sharing tips and suggestions, and occasionally made a friend of a colleague.

I remember reading sometime in the early 1990’s a book by Faith Popcorn called “The Popcorn Report.” In it she predicted a future trend of “cocooning” whereby people retreat into their own dark little world exhausted from the constant barrage of people, things, and technology. At the time, I thought it was referring to staying at home and isolating ones self. Now I realize that you can do that anywhere by simply holding the box to your ear or putting in your earplugs – instant solitude.

But I do miss the occasional random chat at a conference.