As seen on screen

Things are not getting any easier for literary societies in lockdown, but at least we are becoming wiser to the possibilities of electronic communication. We've simply had to.

    There is a lot to be said for making our activities available online. Many members, even those of an advanced age, have begun using tools like Zoom and Facebook in a way they would never have dreamed of attempting a year ago. Much as we may prefer the written word to a screen adaptation, the appetite for recorded and/or streamed content is increasing almost daily. Perhaps you, too, have found yourself unable to attend an interesting live seminar on your computer because you were already booked for another live seminar at the same time. With luck, you will have been able to access a recording of the one you missed.

    Many societies have been slow to adapt to "new technology" in the twenty or thirty years it's been available. I've come across many speakers at local meetings who prefer slide projectors to Powerpoint and I've even seen some, in recent years, struggling with OHP projectors, which - let's face it - were never very user-friendly even when there was no alternative. Sometimes this is just a practical matter: buying new electronic equipment costs money.

    It doesn't necessarily work, anyway. This blog, for example, has been in existence for about eight years, and in that time the readership has shrunk rather than grown. The same goes for our Facebook group - regularly used and contributed to by many people, but only around a quarter of those who are members of the group (many of whom are not actually members of the Sassoon Fellowship) ever actually look at the posts, and still fewer join in the discussions. Hence we have held back from attempting to expand into other areas such as Twitter and Instagram; it's not economical of effort.

    Nevertheless, the cancellation of so many live events has led to the societies I'm involved with having been obliged to hold AGMs and other events online, and most of us got off to a shaky start. Even joining a Zoom meeting requires a certain amount of skill, let alone hosting one, as I've been forced to do many times now. For me, however, the revelation has been YouTube. Not that I was unfamiliar with YouTube before last February. I've been using it for years to look for songs I couldn't remember, music I couldn't listen to because I don't have a working CD player in the house, ancient TV programmes that I thought I would never see again, and so on.

    The YouTube landscape has also changed in the past year, however, and for a while even the owners of YouTube could not cope with the sudden upturn in demand. Until the autumn, I didn't even know that you could livestream a Zoom meeting straight to YouTube to enable you to reach a bigger audience without having to pay extra for a Zoom upgrade; it was only when I saw an academic institution doing it that I realised. In September, thanks to my daughter who already know much (but not all) of this, I sat in a small bedroom surrounded by microphones and computers and hosted the AGM of the Barbara Pym Society, followed by a one hour "mini-conference", attended by delegates from all over Europe and the United States as well as the UK. (See my earlier post on this subject.) In doing so, I learned a lot about what NOT to do, as well as what worked well. 

    From there it was a short hop to participating in the "lockdown reading" of a classic novel, and this has spurred on the Sassoon Fellowship to attempt comparable feats, although we are a long way from fulfilling our ambitions yet. We have, however, uploaded two recorded interviews to our new YouTube "channel" (see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1wV-qorFfCLDaWhmIK6Adw/videos ) for the benefit of our members and others who are interested in Sassoon and his work. The Wilfred Owen Association has held live seminars on individual poems by Owen. Even the small local history society of which I'm a member has managed to hold regular monthly meetings on Zoom.

    One of the most interesting things about this trend is that we are attracting a whole new audience. Elderly and disabled people who always found it a chore to attend meetings in person are catching on quickly. Others who were unable to attend events because of transport difficulties, cost, or simply the time involved, are able to access us on the small screen and sometimes to participate actively.  Don't forget, when you are viewing or joining in, that there may be substantial effort involved in setting up these events and the organisers (although we often feel more like the "disorganised") may not be able to keep it up indefinitely. But for the time being, enjoy them, appreciate them, and - best of all - offer constructive feedback. At the time of writing, no one really knows what the future has in store.