On gathering: after a year of Zoom, place still matters
Oregon matters not only because of its contiguous land amid ocean and rivers and mountains but also because of the people who live here and the ideas that people who live here develop together.
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Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.
For the last several months, I’ve gone to the office—the office of my employer, Oregon Humanities—about twice a week. The office is in downtown Portland in a building that covers a full city block. Our largely empty east-facing spot on the mezzanine holds 16 work spaces, a room for seminars and training, three small meeting rooms, a storage room, and a combination kitchen/copy room. In a year, our lease is up. The question we’re considering—a question many people and organizations around Oregon and beyond are now considering—is: what should we do about the office?
Many of us, pre-COVID, were accustomed to spending almost as many of our waking hours at the office as at home, almost as much time with colleagues as with family or friends. The office has been a central gathering place, a requirement, a bane and a pleasure, and a central fact of many people’s lives, including my own.
Now that we seem to be jabbing ourselves toward a less restrictive relationship with COVID and other people, questions about the function and purpose of the office have opened up. Who and what is the office for, and who and what isn’t it for? How frequently and in what configurations should we gather? How should these spaces be set up and what tools should they hold? Do we even need an office at all?
It should be clear by now that COVID-related questions about the office are inseparable from other questions about gathering. Once you start thinking about the workplace, you can’t help but think about other kinds of shared space, all kinds of public space. Why do we gather in person with others? What’s the risk and what’s the reward, what are the costs and benefits, of leaving home to go to places where my body and other people’s bodies are close? Why not take a big step into this past year’s adjustments and simply embrace distance, or at least selective and intentional rather than compulsory and thoughtless gathering?
In my own strange work of creating conditions for people to connect and converse across differences of background and belief, I’ve learned this year that there are huge benefits to being virtually rather than physically together. Just in the last two weeks, I’ve been in virtual rooms with people from more places around Oregon and more time zones around the world than I could recount here. And the combinations of people in these rooms would simply not have been possible if we hadn’t been forced by COVID to go virtual.
COVID has shown us how the vast and open digital space makes it possible for unlikely and even undreamed-of connections and combinations to spring up at the click of a button, and it has also made clear that there’s a real and persistent digital divide that has left too many of us behind. If the Biden administration’s focus on Internet access bears fruit, more people will have more access to these kinds of connections and combinations—and this would be a significant step forward, both in terms of technology and inclusive democracy.
Seeing how technology has helped bring faraway people close, it makes sense to wonder what close means anymore. Now that I’m used to sitting at home and participating in conversations with people in Klamath Falls, La Grande, Guam, and Toronto, how much should I try to be and talk with my neighbors in SE Portland, or my co-workers downtown, or Oregon Humanities’ conversation leaders and writers and board members and partner organizations all around the state? How much should neighborhood matter, or city or county or state?
Given how much Oregon Humanities has done in the relatively borderless virtual realm over the last year, why not drop the first word of our organization’s name altogether? And while we’re at it, why not hire people wherever they live and simply be done with our downtown Portland office and its seminar room, copier, water dispensers, and east-facing windows?
These questions about placeless offices and global connections now feel like serious, present questions. Yet I know that we will, without question, continue to base our operations in a shared physical office that’s planted in a meaningful place in Oregon. We will set this office up somewhat differently than it was set up before COVID, and we will expect different kinds of commitments from people working at Oregon Humanities, but we will continue to do a good part of our work in a shared physical space.
We will also, as soon as circumstances allow, convene people to participate in programs together in different places around Oregon. There will be inefficiencies and risks and costs to all this gathering—office gathering and program gathering—but we have never once felt that the significance of these inefficiencies and risks and costs mean that we should stop getting together.
What we do feel—what we know, deeply—is that physical community matters. Bodies in proximity matter—human bodies and geographic bodies. Boundaries matter. Limits matter. And the ideas that grow from these boundaries and limits matter too. Oregon matters not only because of its contiguous land amid ocean and rivers and mountains but also because of the people who live here and the ideas—including ideas about Oregon—that people who live here develop together.
There are deep goods that are simply intrinsic to being with others. There are even deeper goods that are intrinsic to being with the same others over time in a shared space. We now know more about alternatives to physical community than we knew before, and we are dedicated to building on what we are learning about these other ways of gathering, but we also know with even more conviction than before that it is good—if not only good—to be together, in person.
So we will, over the next few uncertain months, go ahead and find our next office. In that office, as well as from that office, we’ll talk with each other and with people around Oregon about the challenges and the virtues of living, in all sorts of ways, together.
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