Ill At Ease

I went to a technology conference/expo/trade show/whatever today. I've been to these things before, you go to a convention center, you walk down aisles of prefab booths, you talk to people for five minutes about their business, you move on. It's something I don't think my grandfather would have been familiar with - especially not the technology aspect* - but it's common now. And, in all honesty, I don't know that the investment companies put forward to attend these things matches any return they might get. Seems like an awful lot of chatting and not a lot of doing.
   After a few mintues wandering the aisles and smiling at vendors I was never going to talk to, I noticed two things that bothered me about the environment. I've noticed this before, but now I could finally put a name to what I felt after all these years.
   First, there was a lot of schoolyard-style sizing up, like Jets and Sharks facing off across an alley. Vendors eyed badges for names and titles, attendees scanned the booths for candy and free stuff, and the mood felt moments away from a fist fight breaking out. I was uncomfortable and aside from the tension I couldn't say why. Then it hit me: everybody was assessing everyone else in terms of what one person might be able to do for another. They weren't interested in talking to people to find out more about them individually, we were all avatars of ourselves, attendees and vendors, reprentatives of our demographic bands instead of human beings. Very off-putting, because I could feel the curiosity follow me as I walked the aisles, which then turned to curt dismissal when the vendors saw I wasn't interested. Like making eye contact with all the girls at the middle school dance but not asking any of them onto the floor, I wasn't making myself popular.
   Second, and as a corollary to the first observation, I realized after about ten mintues of people watching that, like me, almost no one in the room actually wanted to be there. Maybe it was a reaction to the dull mood, but I got the distinct impression that we were moments away from a stampede for the exits. It felt like the time I was caught in a pool hall when a fight broke out, all eyes on the door and every man for himself. Kind of poisonous.
   I'm curious to know if that mood is a result of something the organizers did, or if it generated spontaneously from the people in attendence. Probably it was a synthesis of both, but if you could figure out why that happened, you could start a business to prevent it from happening. Put a little math to it, a little rigor, and you could charge a pretty penny to make sure conferences succeed, instead of go down like the one I was just at.



* he had the biggest Rolodex I've ever seen, yellowed index cards packed with names and numbers in faded pencil and blue pen that had bled out over time. If you don't know what a Rolodex is you're a true child of the digital age.