Events

A book is more than the content it contains. An event is more than the activities on stage.

How do you teach? No that is not the right question. How do you transmit a practice? The answer does not lie in simply and clearly outlining a series of necessary steps, explaining a system, or providing needed information.

It's something you learn often only through action, through a struggle of some sort. This is never more so if the learning is about method, about pedagogy itself, or about how you argue and decide with other people. The answer you seek here is not within any clear simple orthodoxy. It is not served cold.

You know the score. Let's get to you later.

The writer or thinker, especially those that are most interested in systems thinking an event is an event. Something possibly to study, but as far as your work is concerned it is a distraction from the task at hand. Your work is structural, the problem you analyse is a systemic one, and your philosophical task is complete when you have analysed and described the nature of the problem, perhaps even proposed a solution.

Your purpose is focus. To cut out inessentials. A task needs to be completed. Something built. Something made. Something written.

And then there is the allocation of scarce resources. Balancing the books. You clearly understand the difficulties of coordinating a group of people on a single activity. People need to be rewarded. Appropriately payed.

An event is for marketing purposes. You require to reach an audience? The work is finished? Now you can had this over to marketing. Or perhaps manage the marketing and events yourself. An event is an event. Sometimes an effective way of garnering attention, or building an audience. Sometimes not.

For the party organiser, like the graphic designer, your role and job is misunderstood. We are all misunderstood after all. You know what you do is to build community. Your job is to create a culture in physical space.

Of course there are those of us that are paid to do what we do. A concert needs organising, a conference needs staging. You are paid well. It is a form of marketing. The community you build is post-product. The speakers have written their books and papers, the band released their album. Now we need to build an audience.

This oxymoron is offensive. Sure if you are an artist, or some sort of narcissist. A religious zealot. These people are dangerous. You say. You think.

You may feel this (I do), and you have reason. But this is the very form of event I want us to examine more closely. The good the bad. What is an event without an audience?

A classroom might be one example. An army drill another. An audience can be forced, or paid for. But there are also events without an audience in the traditional sense, where small number of people turn up - by choice.

Let's break audience up into segments: passive and active. Those that wish to be entertained, and those that want to make, do something even if difficult, painful, or perhaps to learn.

This is an audience of course, just not often a very profitable one. We don't usually call these events, and if we do as in the case of traditional conferences, the audience is not there to actively participate - not as a main activity at least. The main is event is still for promotional purposes, and to attract fee paying customers who seek to be entertained, to meet stars - People of Eminence.