Shan Wu

I’m in Toronto for a conference on tissue engineering, and all of the talks started today. For the first time ever at one of these conferences, I saw people taking pictures of presentations with digital cameras. Whenever a new slide gets shown, or even sometimes when animation on a single slide gets changed, someone would take a picture. Is this a new form of note-taking? It really struck me as rather odd.

My first reaction was one of shock: “Oh my god, are they allowed to do that in this day and age of oversensitivity to IP??” Then I reasoned that taking a picture of a presentation slide is not that much more damaging considering that the content is being presented orally anyway (and theoretically available on the abstract CD). But the whole concept still felt somewhat off to me. If I were presenting, I’d be pretty thrown by cameras pointed at my slides snapping images as I paced through my presentation.

Perhaps more interestingly, the presentation-slide-photographers are almost entirely Asian. Seeing that the conference boasts attendees from 20 different countries, I wonder if the cameras are an emerging trend in Asia-hosted scientific meetings that got carried over here to Toronto/North America through the venue of an international conferece.