{"id":4267,"date":"2011-08-30T15:40:09","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T19:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=4267"},"modified":"2011-09-10T15:11:09","modified_gmt":"2011-09-10T19:11:09","slug":"why-the-asa-meetings-need-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/08\/30\/why-the-asa-meetings-need-wi-fi\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the ASA Meetings Need Wi-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Apache has its priorities straight: Wi-Fi & coffee.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The annual meetings of the American Sociological Association were held this past week in Las Vegas. More than 5,000 sociologists converged from departments around the world to meet face-to-face in a massive conference hotel. Planning such an event is a massive undertaking with a vast array of logistical issues; yet, one facet of the meeting, Wi-Fi access (or, rather, its inadequacy), sparked a major debate.<\/p>\n

First, we should mention that as conference organizers who have run up against the limits of a venue’s Wi-Fi infrastructure, we understand the difficulties in getting people reliably connected. During last Spring’s Theorizing the Web<\/a> conference, the Wi-Fi crashed under such heavy pressure. However, we were working with a classroom building on a campus, not a massive conference hotel that already has Wi-Fi access built in. It is now the norm for major conference venues to have Wi-Fi available at a price. While the relatively small Theorizing the Web conference might not have a budget for universal Wi-Fi access, ASA could easily spread the cost over the massive number of those paying for registration (or even make a separate Wi-Fi registration fee).<\/p>\n

Having Wi-Fi at the ASA meetings is important. Let\u2019s take just Twitter for an example. As we previously noted<\/a>, 559 people produced nearly 3,500 tweets with the #ASA2011 hashtag (archived here<\/a>). This content is being broadcast out to all of their many followers, too (for example, Zeynep Tufekci<\/a> has over 4,000 followers around the globe). We have discussed before that Twitter creates a \u201cbackchannel\u201d to the physical conference, facilitating an \u201caugmented conference<\/a>\u201d experience.\u00a0Using Twitter allows one to<\/p>\n