The advent of national and worldwide Covid-19 led many workers in the private and public sectors, students and families, along with all sorts of organizations to depend on communicating by Internet; doing business; meeting deadlines; submitting reports, and so on. The familiarity with competing video conference platforms grew, day by day, and so did awareness of the benefits and the limitations of virtual social interaction. As a new book club gets ready to launch at the beginning of 2022, this one organized around East Asia anthropology faculty and graduate students from many locations, a comparison between the circle of learning from Ancient Greece’s citizens and the academic citizens of today comes to mind. The well-articulated ideas shared and the interplay of responses may be more or less the same in a salon of ancient Greece and in a video meeting today, but other aspects differ.
During a planning meeting online, the book club participants described why they had responded to the suggestion to hold a get-together for 90 minutes in the months of February, April, June, and October. A common thread among those interested in participating was to read something that was not strictly work-related and for the purpose of interacting with others in a low-stakes, non-performative (casual) setting in order to learn from each other’s view of the featured subject. In this case the scope of reading is connected to East Asia anthropology, but being so vast, it is likely that many of the books that rotating session leaders will be about subjects outside of one’s own narrow expertise. In this way, the gathering recaptures a little of the intellectual freedom experienced during one’s own graduate school days, except that there is no tuition payment, assignment, or grading: the exchange of ideas is purely voluntary and motivated by intellectual curiosity. By comparison, the structure Plato’s symposium involves seven prominent speakers in a semi-leisure, private setting; not a public spectacle or performance. And since learning is social and relational, food was also on the table, along with the topics at hand.
The ancient event is portrayed this way on (English language) Wikipedia:
The Symposium (Ancient Greek: Συμπόσιον, Sympósion [sympósi̯on]) is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–370 BC. It depicts a friendly contest of extemporaneous speeches given by a group of notable men attending a banquet. The men include the philosopher Socrates, the general and political figure Alcibiades, and the comic playwright Aristophanes. The speeches are to be given in praise of Eros, the god of love and desire.
Different to an online bookclub, the outlay of ideas come from the attendees of the Symposium. Obviously, there is no Internet or digital devices for communicating the live interaction with concurrent chat box provided now for online meeting platforms. So whatever notes did come from the ancient Greek event were jotted on wax or hide or papyrus. Or else the literature handed down to people today was composed from the author’s memory; or indeed was entirely something of the writer’s imagination that acts like a vessel for the original thoughts posed as dialog. Turning to 2022, how do the high-speed Internet possibilities for communication in the bookclub appear by comparison?
The scheduled time to discuss a book selected by the session leader is still weeks away from this writing, but the overall plan for supporting and facilitating the live meeting can be divided into phases before, during, and after. In advance of the session, the planning group of 7 formulated the overall shape of the experience and then made a listserv announcement describing the concept, and inviting interested colleagues and graduate students to register their wish to join by contacting a designated record-keeper. Once the total session reaches 20, then the circle is closed in order to allow everyone there a chance or two to speak during the live meeting. Participants can read the selected book in any form that suits them: purchase, borrow, print, audio, or electronic edition. The session leader decides on the balance of book-centric question prompts on the one hand and a looser approach on the other hand so that participants can pursue tangents where they may happen to lead. Pledges by other participants to accept a turn in future session leader roles establishes the year’s calendar so that everyone can know what books will be coming next. There is no penalty for skipping one session or another. Everything is run simply and engagement is purely by free will.
Unlike the Symposium of long ago, many of the bookclub participants have not met in person before, so one helpful idea is to create an editable online document with a space for each person to write a brief self-introduction, in effect boiling down their professional interests or projects to a few key words so that others may form a rough and ready sense of the others who will take part in the session and perhaps will discover mutual interests that otherwise would not necessarily arise in the informal conversation during the live meeting.
As an aid to the session leader, another online document for participants is a form that allows inputs of questions, themes, or other elements that each reader identifies from the book. The cumulative listing of these various inputs to the online form then is a common document to help the session leader prepare for the event, but also to allow interested participants to see the range of reader responses.
During the live session, whatever pops up in the chat session concurrent to the spoken interchange can be copied and pasted into a separate document, too. Then after the session closes, that earlier pool of (anonymous) reader responses from the online form can be supplemented with the (anonymous) chat transcript and the session leader’s own prepared opening remarks to form an instant blog article for the particular session. That way, book after book, a kind of breadcrumb trail can be left for participants to look back to, and for anybody who did not participate to glimpse some of the reactions, too.
As a result of the before, during, and after phases of the online bookclub the total space occupied by the event extends far beyond the 90 minutes of the live session. By virtue of its digital composition, the circle of the event extends around the planet and lives long after the month and day of the actual discussion. Perhaps this distributed kind of intellectual exchange would tickle Plato’s fancy or stir his imagination to accommodate interested people far away and long into the future. But then after all, thanks to the printing press and literacy and translators, Plato has indeed already succeeded in touching interested people far away and long into the future, even without the benefit of shared documents, input forms of feedback, and a dedicated blog.
