Surprisingly Interesting
A dispatch from the 2012 Boring Conference.
By Mark O'Connell|Posted Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012, at 11:41 AM ET
Why would hundreds of people be sitting in a cold East London community hall on a Sunday morning, listening to people talk about toasters and IBM cash machines and self-service checkouts? Because people enjoy boring things. This, at least, is the contrarian premise of Boring, a conference that has taken place every November for the last three years. If the whole thing sounds like an idle Twitter gag, that’s because that’s exactly how it started. In 2010, when a conference called Interesting was canceled, Ward (who maintains a blog called I Like Boring Things) jokingly tweeted that he was thinking of filling the gap by organizing a conference called Boring. Lots of people tweeted back at him saying that if he actually arranged such a thing, they would definitely attend it. So he did, and its program of short presentations on topics of appealing banality—one speaker held forth on his fondness for car park roofs, another on his project of logging each of his sneezes over the previous three years—turned out, against all apparent odds, to be a major success. Last year drew a larger crowd, high-profile speakers like journalist Jon Ronson and documentary-maker Adam Curtis, and a fair amount of media attention. Despite this year’s lack of such relatively glitzy boredom impresarios, the conference still sold out in record time. The deepening London chill was forcing everyone to keep their coats on, but the mood in the hall was one of skittish communal joy.
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