Are conferences worth it?

Having just been to a conference for two days, locked in a stuffy university room with (literally) no sunlight, and even though the content was really awesome and totally up my alley, it was so tiring! So I might not be in the best mood to right this but I nevertheless will. Are conferences worth it? It is worth to travel for a very long time, to be away from your home and family and other obligations, to cancel classes etc, to present and to be presented to at a conference? And then I am even only talking about the costs to me and mine, what about the financial costs to taxpayers and the costs to the environment?

I have written before in a Volkskrant (in Dutch) that I was sad that after Covid we did not keep up the virtual of hybrid conferences (although to be fair, the conference I went to was hybrid, people both participated and presented online, which is surely better than nothing), because international travel is such a vector for exclusion. People with all sort of care and teaching responsibilities (often women) have a much harder time going, as do people with visa issues, disabilities or just a general dislike of travelling. Plus traveling exposes you to the ever increasing bureaucratic systems of the university for simply booking hotels and getting your expenses refunded.

For all the downsides, what are the upsides? There seem to be a few that people mention when I bring it up at conferences. One is discoverability of your research. If you give a talk about your work, people will know about it, cite it, and build upon it. In times of social media, one can question whether that is true, for about two decades now most paper I find, I find though the socials. And yeah I know not everyone is so terminally online, but it could be organized differently too. Journals could lean into this and make truly good videos of papers, and some do! ACM made a very cool video about our paper 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning! This could be more widespread, and they could be published these with the journal. Research groups around the world could totally organize async viewing parties where you watch a few recent ones and hang out together at a smaller scale, and those could even be hosted online.

The other one is networking, hanging out at a conference you can make friends for life in the field that can then help you later in your career, to collaborate with, write letters of recommendation, find job opportunities etc. And the final one might be bonding which is somewhat different from networking. Many people might be the only one in their research group interested in a certain topic, and it is nice to hang out with similar people that can also give you pointers to research you can't find so easily yourself. Very true, only this week while chatting with an awesome researcher at this conference I was at I learned about St Jude, a feminist internet icon!

So yeah, it is somewhat useful although much less useful than pre-internet and pre-social media, but worth it? I don't know. It seems that they are just fun, eating and drinking and banter, that is fun! And that people that like them, are much more likely to stay in academia and then need to defend them af useful. But it is ultimately fun at the expense of so many people that can't participate seems less and less fun the more I think about it, and if you really believe they are useful, they are also useful at the expense of so many people that can't participate. I think just really really wish after covid we figured a way how to make academic communication feasible enough to continue!