l think a lot of it comes down to goals and function.
In my experience a significant portion and function of academic conferences are to get feedback on works in progress: speakers present the project they’re working on, get feedback from a specialized and expert audience, and the audience get to keep up with the current state of things. It’s a part of a collaborative process, and I think that this does actually benefit from there being no recording or written published artifact, because it allows for an unpolished and much rougher version of the work to exist without there being much risk of errors in it being publicized or perpetuated through citation or sharing—kind of like a lower pressure and less risky preprint. This obviously isn’t the case for all conferences or for all presentations, but it is something I’ve personally majorly benefitted from in my research. I’ve also attended some conferences where speakers were open about being more able to safely speak about politically contentious issues because they weren’t worried about there being an easily accessible document for the government to use against them, but that’s obviously specific to a context where academic freedom is limited by political pressure and threat of persecution.
Also, for academia, in person presentations like job talks function as a kind of dry run for hiring decisions. Academics teach, and presenting or teaching in an in person context is a different dynamic and skill set than presenting something in a prerecorded format.
In person conferences also serve major functions for both networking and building a community of researchers that have the resources and ability to interact with each other in ways that are less formal than the back and forth of academic publishing.
There’s also a lot of institutional factors that come into play. Alongside the networking aspect, academics use conferences for CV building. Conferences are usually peer reviewed and having your abstract selected for presentation signals a level of quality and rigor that isn’t necessarily present for producing and posting a video.
l think a lot of it comes down to goals and function.
In my experience a significant portion and function of academic conferences are to get feedback on works in progress: speakers present the project they’re working on, get feedback from a specialized and expert audience, and the audience get to keep up with the current state of things. It’s a part of a collaborative process, and I think that this does actually benefit from there being no recording or written published artifact, because it allows for an unpolished and much rougher version of the work to exist without there being much risk of errors in it being publicized or perpetuated through citation or sharing—kind of like a lower pressure and less risky preprint. This obviously isn’t the case for all conferences or for all presentations, but it is something I’ve personally majorly benefitted from in my research. I’ve also attended some conferences where speakers were open about being more able to safely speak about politically contentious issues because they weren’t worried about there being an easily accessible document for the government to use against them, but that’s obviously specific to a context where academic freedom is limited by political pressure and threat of persecution.
Also, for academia, in person presentations like job talks function as a kind of dry run for hiring decisions. Academics teach, and presenting or teaching in an in person context is a different dynamic and skill set than presenting something in a prerecorded format.
In person conferences also serve major functions for both networking and building a community of researchers that have the resources and ability to interact with each other in ways that are less formal than the back and forth of academic publishing.
There’s also a lot of institutional factors that come into play. Alongside the networking aspect, academics use conferences for CV building. Conferences are usually peer reviewed and having your abstract selected for presentation signals a level of quality and rigor that isn’t necessarily present for producing and posting a video.