The internet was just going mainstream in 1996, when a meetings professional named Pegotty Cooper made uncannily accurate predictions about how technology would affect meetings in the future.  

Thirty years ago, one in five people in the U.S. used the internet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But an interview with Pegotty Cooper, CAE, director of special interest group services for the Association for Computing Machinery, showed how expansively one meeting professional was already thinking about how the internet would connect us and transform the industry. In the story, “High-Tech Conversations,” published in the October 1996 Convene issue, Cooper described how the “electronic” focus groups and workshops she organized were enabling people who couldn’t afford to travel to participate in meetings and were giving voice to people who have difficulty sharing questions and opinions face-to-face.

Convene: Are we all going to be isolated in cyberspace staring at our computers, filling our lonely brains with endless information?

Cooper:  I don’t believe so, and I certainly hope not. The people aspect of conferences will always be an important part of the equation. We need that fundamental interaction to nourish our souls. But I believe technology is going to enable us to continue the interaction after the event is over. With the converging of technology, all kinds of wondrous things are possible.

I … suspect we are all going to have to get much more sophisticated about the delivery of information. We need to understand what it is our members want and how they want to receive it. And we need to learn how to structure that information so that it can be readily digested by groups of people that use different filter mechanisms.

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor

Read more from our archives in a story about Convene’s 30th anniversary.